


Night Crossing

by fallingvoices



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Fix-It, Journey to the Underworld, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Post-Infinity War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-04-30 05:51:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14490213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingvoices/pseuds/fallingvoices
Summary: Natasha, bent over his eyes, her hair bright in the white light. "Suicide mission, Rogers," she said, in her hoarse whiskey-voice. "Here." And she tucked two coins in his other hand. "For the ferryman." Her face was a little tight, her mouth thin and bloodless. "You see Sam and Wanda … ""All of them," he said. "All of them, or—""You, too," she said, and kissed his cheek, as she had once done in a cemetery, years ago. "Bring Barnes home."Or: Steve descends into the Underworld, looking for the dead.





	Night Crossing

### First Gate.

"They are not dead."

They—they the survivors, all the few of them, the remaining, the left behind, abandoned by the dead—had reconvened in the grand royal hall of Wakanda, carrying their dead and their wounded. It was dawn. A pale, lifeless, unearthly dawn. Somehow this terrible sleepless night had gone by, and Steve had not slept.

He hadn't taken off his torn, filthy, stained clothes. His hair was matted to his forehead and his neck, his face bloodied; he sat with his elbows upon his knees, his forehead bent low over his hands. He was distantly aware that Natasha stood beside him, back erect, her eyes wide and dark and empty. In the thin light her bleached hair was white as a halo around her neck. Rhodes and Bruce sat huddled on the steps, unspeaking and grim.

"They are not dead," Thor repeated, but his voice was breaking. "We merely exist within a framework of reality from which they have disappeared."

Hope flared, a small, distant flame in the chambers of Steve's heart, and died immediately. "No," he said. His voice was a croak.

 _Steve,_ Bucky had said. _Steve_ , in a voice that held little fear, only surprise, as—in front of him—he had dissolved into black dirt … The Wakandans, though mourning, had been kind. Too kind for them, perhaps. Steve had brought the battle to them, and Wakanda was grieving its king.

Hours after, when they had gathered the carcasses of the monsters who had attacked them, and laid out the bodies of Wakanda's dead warriors, they had made the count. (The pyres burned high and dark in the grey sky.) Bucky had been the first one gone. Then Sam—Steve's heart clenched at the thought; his poor battered heart—Sam, T'Challa, Wanda; Vision a shell of his robotic body. Half the Wakandans, all made into dust. All it had taken was a flicker of that damn gauntlet—a snap of Thanos's fingers … Thor had spoken to them haltingly of Thanos, of his mad resolve, his intent to wipe out those he thought extraneous to the universe's survival. He had, he claimed, torn into the monster's chest with an axe forged for that purpose in the heart of a star. He had thought to kill him, to avenge his brother and his kin, his people dead on a starship light-years away from Earth.

It had not worked. They had been fighting for nothing. Half of humanity, swept out like dark dust. Half the universe, perhaps. From outside of Wakanda, signals of panic and chaos were coming in. Planes had crashed over their heads, scattering their sad remains. Voices had died out mid-word. Thanos's madness was spreading, a contagion that spanned worlds.

Steve put his face against his hands, and he thought, with the fierce, fearless belief of a little boy, _It can't be. He can't be._

Dead, dead. Not even a body left behind, nothing to mourn. No hope left.

He was blind. He was deaf. He didn't think he could take any more. There weren't any tears left in his body. He had mourned Bucky once in 1945, twice again on the helicarrier, tasting blood; he had mourned Peggy in 2016 and had born her casket to the ground. He kept on watching them die.

He had thought Bucky safe in Wakanda, and had only succeeded in bringing his death to him. Bucky had escaped it once too many times. Fate didn't give away third chances.

Natasha sat brusquely beside him. Her face was smeared with dirt and black blood.

Bruce said, "Thor, they're dead. They're gone. He erased them from _history_. There's no other framework of reality."

"Even a god can't bring them back," said Natasha, tonelessly, uselessly. She had not heard from Clint and his family. Rhodes had not heard from Stark. She said: "We lost." Her voice trembled, as though on the cusp of tears, and she made to gather herself. Visibly, she took her grief and locked it away. It was a wonder of emotional engineering. Distantly, abstractedly, Steve wondered if there would ever be a day when he, too, had lost so much he would know how to parcel out his sorrow and keep it in a box and throw away the key.

"No. It is true: they cannot be dead," said a very clear, young voice.

 

* * *

 

Shuri, only seventeen, her face lined with sleeplessness and horror and joy, twined her fingers together, a nervous, trembling spasm. She was flanked by the Dora Milaje who, fighting at T'Challa's side, had watched him disappear: Okoye, severe and implacable.

On one of the white screens behind Shuri a small star-light was glowing gently. She had lost her brother. She was the heir to the kingdom of Wakanda, and her shoulders were tight under the burden. But she stood with her chin up, and she had somehow found hope.

"My brother—" Her voice cracked. She swallowed tears. "I put," she said, as slowly as though she was picking her way through a dark path, "a signal. A sun tracker. One in T'Challa's suit, and one—" She nodded ruefully at Steve. "—in your friend's arm. White Wolf. Also our warriors: they wear our uniform, lined with software, sewn and embroidered into the hems. All of our clothes have them. It is not harmful. But we like to know our weapons, in case our technology is stolen from Wakanda."

Okoye, behind her, inclined her head; she was grave, she was so sad. She seemed to have aged ten years in the night. "King T'Challa ordered it. He was careful."

"He is careful," Shuri said carefully. She pressed a remote, and the scope of the screen widened, so that the star-point of light was met with constellations all around: on and on they flickered into life. Morse code, Steve thought; S-O-S, S-O-S—

"What you're saying," said Bruce, "what you're saying is—what are you saying? That they're half-alive?"

"His signal should have died out, if he had perished. It burns on body temperature alone."

"But you're still getting the signal," Rhodes said; his voice was of a calm, temperate, even tone, so he had a hell of a tight rein on his temper. "Which means there's a body. A _warm_ body."

A living body. Shuri glanced at him. "Yes. Of a sort."

Of a sort. God. Steve closed his eyes. Natasha, beside him, touched her fingers briefly to his matted hair.

He said, "Bucky?" _Steve_ , he had said, sounding—surprised—and …

"Yes. Him, too. Their bodies are sustained in a half-state of existence, somewhere."

Inside his chest his heart was too big for breathing. _"Where?"_

"That is the hard part. I don't know. Not, I think, in this world." Shuri was breathing fast, and in her young voice was a thin, wary thread of wonder. The scientist in her, he would learn later, had found in her discovery something that belonged more to the marvelous than to the mathematical. She had looked for her brother, and she had found a miracle.

"You speak of a different dimension," said Thor. His voice was different: more resonant, burdened with loss and blood; _he_ , too, was different, of the shorn hair and the golden left eye. He had spoken few words of the tragedy that had led Thanos to him and his people. Fewer yet of the catastrophe that had befallen his world. Thor was a god, or as good as a god could be, and wore his grief proud, like a cloak thrown about his shoulders. Next to him, drooping, unspeaking, was a—well, it was a raccoon.

Steve had not asked. Raccoons walked, talked, fired rockets out of hand, and Bucky was dead.

Shuri looked doubtful. "Yes. Yes. A different—world? Not here, but not there either."

"My father told me of such worlds. Planes of the universe existing in unison, so close to one another that they brush, and sometimes melt together … " Thor had warmed to his subject, reciting as naively as a boy who had learned his lesson well. "The dead cannot visit them, nor the living. It is the half-dead, and the never-dead, and the almost-dead, who inhabit those halls. It is dangerous to go there, but at times we hear echoes of them. Signals. Calls." His face grew somber. "Would that I could hear my brother so."

"In this world, we call that purgatory," said Rhodes. "Or Hell."

"The signal is faint," Natasha murmured. She was looking at the star-constellations, at their endless call for help. "Getting fainter."

"Thanos," said Thor, his voice resuming strong, "was wrong. He cannot control life or death, as we or he know them. Certainly the Gauntlet allows him to manipulate time, space, or reality; he can dissociate souls from their bodies and dissolve physical bodies into ash. But he cannot _kill_ , as such. All that he can do is induce an imbalance between the worlds. Therefore—" He nodded at the screen. "—the signal. They are misplaced, sent in another plane of our dimension. They are in the realm of the half-dead, where we consign our beasts and our monsters. But their bodies remain in some fashion warm and alive. These were not rightful deaths."

"Hey, this is crazy," said Bruce. "Is that just me?"

"Maybe," said Steve, and they all of them fell silent, and looked at him. He took in a breath. His lungs ached. He still had to cry. "Maybe. But if there's a single chance to bring a single one of them back, I'm taking it."

"Yeah, that's nice," said Bruce, and then glanced at Shuri, a little shame-facedly. "Can _you_ send him out there? I think it's a bit out of my wheelhouse."

"There are means," said Thor, "to go. I know of some of them. Passageways in time and space, which bodies may breach, but from which few are allowed return. It is a death of sorts, a first step into the unknown." Sadly, he added, "Loki knew several of these ways. Had I asked, he might have helped us in this task. But I fear this is his final voyage; he has escaped me forever."

"Tony isn't answering my calls," said Rhodey, off-handedly. "Pepper hasn't heard from him either. If he's still off of Earth, we have no means of contact."

God. Steve set his teeth.

White-faced, Natasha asked: "Fury, Hill?" "Nothing."

There was a pause, and Steve realized, with a jolt, that he was waiting for Sam to speak— _this_ was where Sam would have said—"We're on our own," said Natasha. And she looked at Steve with a hard, pensive look, as though she knew what he was about to do, as though she could see all the way down into his beaten-up heart.

He had known, too, he had always known; this was what he did for a goddamn living. Sacrifice one pawn, save the board. If he could return T'Challa back to his people—return Sam, Vision, Wanda to the living, and half the world with them—if he could see Bucky one final time, and hear his voice, his rueful amusement: "I swear to god, you punk, you ever think your shit through?"—never, Buck, never. I've missed you for years. And there were words he had never said to him. Worlds of meaning. He meant to say them now, if he could. Grasp his hard body against his and tear him from death, if he could.

"I'll go," he said. "I'll go." He held out his hands, palms up, wrists bare, towards Shuri and Thor. "I could bring them back. You know that I could."

Natasha winced, and turned her face away. Rhodey, grave but understanding, said nothing. And Okoye—hard-faced and half-swaying with a carefully managed exhaustion—said: "If you do not return, Captain, then I will be the one who comes after you." .

 

* * *

 

"There will be a tree," said Thor. "Drink." The liquid was thick and ochre-brown, and tasted of honey and smoke. _Mead_ , Steve thought, swallowing. Thor tenderly laid his head back down; he was half-sitting, half-lying, upon a wooden pallet. This was the heart of Wakanda, into which Shuri secretly had led them: an underground garden like the gates of paradise. "You must find the tree; it will aid your steps and ensure your journey back. Down and down. Do not lose yourself; heed no voices. Those who return from that realm like not to speak of it, but yet some are very like scavengers, who will tell their stories before they die. They speak of a dark river, a tunnel under the mountain … "

Steve was drowsy, half-listening. Something funny was happening in his lungs. Thor added: "You will have to pay for passage."

"I know," said Steve.

Shuri came, then, and pressed something hard and small, cold, in his palm. He closed his fingers around it, and felt its curious shape. She smiled, wobbly and brave, and said in a low tone, "Bring home my brother." Then she was gone. She conferred with Thor a few feet away. Steve hardly recognized their voices.

Of all of them he had to be the one to go: it made the greatest sense: it was his own heart that was already half-gone, already split in two. Half of himself was wandering in the underworld, waiting for him.

Natasha, bent over his eyes, her hair bright in the white light. "Suicide mission, Rogers," she said, in her hoarse whiskey-voice. "Here." And she tucked two coins in his other hand. "For the ferryman."

"You believe that?" he asked; she shrugged.

"Doesn't hurt." Her face was a little tight, her mouth thin and bloodless. "You see Sam and Wanda … "

"All of them," he said. "All of them, or—"

"You, too," she said, and kissed his cheek, as she had once done in a cemetery, years ago. "Bring Barnes home."

The light had gone wrong. It was turning dark at its edges, like rust.

Rhodes. The procession of the living. "If Tony is down there, Rogers—tell him Pepper is likely to kill him, hear? He was telling her about having _kids_ yesterday."

Kids. A small Stark. The Earth, having survived alien invasions galore, would never withstand it. A Stark brood would shoot it up like a fireworks display. Steve found the idea at once strange and amusing. It was a worthwhile fate, if he could manage it. "I'll do that. If," he added, a touch of wryness breaking through the daze, "he'll talk to me."

Rhodes' face was tired; it looked like old wood. He glanced away, a telling pull at his mouth. "He will."

Then Okoye was standing over him, her face still and somber, and her eyes very hard.

"You must promise me something, Captain," she said to him directly. "You are likely to meet monsters, wherever down you go. You must not let them kill you. You must bring King T'Challa back."

Steve said, "Why would I—" Then he understood, and fell silent. "T'Challa isn't the only one down there," he said finally, which wasn't an answer.

"No. But you have brought the battle to Wakanda; my king could have turned you away, and he did not. We sacrificed our lives. Half of Wakanda is dead for the sake of one man, who gladly would have died for you, if you only had asked. You bear that burden with you wherever you go." She paused. "Shuri is—" She rolled the word around in her mouth, as though in distaste: " _forgiving_. I am not."

Steve closed his eyes, and felt the shame of it in his gut. He said, "I know."

Okoye said, "We have tales of the world where you are going. Perhaps it is your duty to set your wrongs right."

Bruce. "Listen. Listen, Steve. This doesn't make any sense, but—alright: I've made my peace with it. I'm in a country I've never even heard of; last couple of days, we were fighting Thanos; earlier I was _in space_ , the Hulk was playing gladiator in an alien arena; I've made my peace with it. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, what matters is: if there's a body, you've _got to bring it back_. Thanos, whatever he did, it broke the laws of physics. You can't reconstruct a body that doesn't exist anymore. Wherever we're sending you, you have to take it all back—its bones, its DNA, its marrow. Half of earth's population is down there."

Steve had no idea what any of this meant. Wearily he said, "Alright. Any words of advice?" but the words came out slurred and soft … he tilted his head; Bruce was gone; the light had become almost dark. Next to him Okoye was watching over him. Thor's voice: "Do not eat, Captain."

"Eat—?"

"Fruit. Meats. Bread. Water. Whatever you may find," Thor said, "do not eat any of it," but the fading remaining light had twisted sideways and winked out, swift as a star, and the pallet and the bodies and the voices were gone.

 

* * *

 

The shell of the train collapsed under the explosion, and with a rush of icy air and a terrible scream Bucky disappeared from view.

Steve tore his way through the metal; it sank dangerously under his weight; Bucky was hanging on to the rail, his hands grasping desperately for purchase. "Take my hand!" Steve shouted—he was almost close enough to touch, to grasp his arm, to haul him up to safety, if only he could scrape a yard or two further down the length of the wagon; but there was in Bucky's wild eyes the knowledge of what was coming to meet him: the fall into the frozen gorge, the terror of seventy years' torture. Steve bit down on the horror of it and found a grip around Bucky's shoulder, dragged him up towards him, clasped him against his chest—Bucky's mouth was shaping his name—and as they staggered for safety the railing shattered and gave way beneath them both.

They fell. The ravine swallowed them. 

 

 

### Second Gate.

There was nothing.

There was nothing.

Nothingnobodynowhere. Like falling asleep, only softer: like water closing over his head. Steve thought for a moment he could hear the distant, unmistakeable sounds of a baseball match on the radio. In a moment a woman would come in and lie to his face, and the world would be—other. Irrevocably unrecognizable. He opened his eyes.

He was not in a SHIELD facility disguised as a 1940s hospital room. He was standing under the stars.

He were standing under the stars. Overhead they were a million, a billion—milky white and swarmed together like bees, in the total silence of a deep, calm night. They were bright enough to show the way, bright as moonshine. Moonshine clean across the ground, which was very hard, and dark-red-brown; when he took a step forward he heard the echo of it underneath him.

It was wood.

_There will be a tree._

Both of his fists were clenched around foreign objects. Painstakingly, with great care, he opened his fingers, though he was slow about it. In his left hand were the two coins Natasha had given him—two ordinary quarters, worn a little smooth, but solid and real; in his right hand was a gold scarab. Its antennae chittered.

He slipped coins and scarab both into his jeans's pockets—he _was_ wearing jeans, regular ol' jeans, and a close-fitting henley, long-sleeved and quite warm. His bloodied uniform was, it seemed, better left in the world of the living. Out of it, he felt pale and oddly vulnerable. There were no longer any distinguishing marks on him; he had no shield, no weapon, nothing but price of passage and a body that didn't know when to give up. Just him left. Kid outta Brooklyn. Long out of Brooklyn. Far and away.

It seemed impossible that he had, perhaps eighteen hours ago, been fighting Thanos, monsters, aliens from outer space. It seemed hardly any more possible that half the Earth's population was dead, turned to dust, sent into an afterworld without thought or reason. In a moment he would wake in 1940, and Bucky would be shaving in the mirror above the sink, humming to a tune on the radio.

The wood-desert looked dark and unending. His shoes meeting the ground made an echo like a warning call.

He walked.

Hours or minutes or seconds passed; it was hard to tell; the starful moonless sky was unchanging above them, churning with untold galaxies. The air tasted clean and sweet, and it was warm, the quiet warmth of summer evenings. There was no North, no South, no East nor West—no direction in any direction. No mountains in the distance, and no streams breaking his way. The wood underneath him was very smooth, and worn, as though from a million, a billion footsteps taken across the desert.

No: it was no longer 1940. But the part of Steve that had always remained there remembered. He remembered Brooklyn in its heatwave of stark summer—Brooklyn sweating, sweltering, golden on top with clay beneath; and Bucky: wearing an undershirt and rolled-down overalls and nothing else, his hair a little damp, feet dancing with himself to the tune on the radio: Bucky who'd never heard a song he didn't like, who'd never met a dame he didn't like, who danced every dance at the dance palace. He had been the one who brought cheapo pulps to Steve's sickbed and read to him from _Black Mask_ and _Planet Stories_ and _Doc Savage_ , doing all the voices; at sixteen he'd saved up for six months to buy a radio, which he'd treasured savagely. Morning after morning in their cramped tenement flat Steve had awoken to jazz music, or flashnews bulletins or swing or some live show: whatever Bucky felt like that day, whatever got his hips swingin' while he shaved. He'd dug up a copy of _Goodbye, Mr Chips_ and read it four times voraciously one winter, and two years later had dragged Steve to see it at the pictures, and had come home from that very quiet and a little sad. He'd sung, too, snatches of tune all patched together like his own head was a radio. He had a real good voice. He had been a real guy. James Barnes was a name on a commemorative plaque, and the Winter Soldier was a myth with blood in his mouth, but Bucky had loved to dance the foxtrot and the jitterbug, and always wanted to go for malt shakes afterwards, and read dime novels that got him melancholy and sour on Sunday evenings.

He was still there. Somewhere in this world—in all these worlds—he was still there dancing, shaving, his hips moving tenderly to a song on the radio. Somewhere Steve was watching him from the doorway, wearing his own imperfect body, his shortened breath, his thin snappy bones. He was thinking of graphite lines on white paper and wondering why the hell Bucky was bothering to have a chump like him as a best pal. This Brooklyn-reality existed, struck gold and clear; it was in Steve's head, and it was somewhere else, too, forever.

Then a shape had moved in the close distance, and Brooklyn winked out like a small sun going nova. There was the desert and the stars and the night. Steve paused, light on his feet but breathing soft. Something smallish, dark against the redwood, with a long nose like a muzzle, and ears perked, like a dog …

It was a jackal.

He approached it: it sat, unmoving now, watching him with—Steve thought, absurdly—some amusement. Its mouth was curved around sharp little teeth. He had fur lustrous black, mottled with grey, and its tall, pointed ears were pointedly tilted towards him.

The jackal ducked its head and yipped, once, a call that was sharp and dry and sounded like nothing so much as laughter, then turned tail and walked away. Sharp left.

In silence he followed. Its claws clicked softly, resoundingly against the wood-floor. He didn't look at the sky. It hurt to look at the sky. He didn't think he could look at anything at all except the small dark shape that moved ahead of him—not at the white valley of wandering stars above his head, nor at the fathomless distance in every direction: he had a guide, he was in way of help, and his every thought was on the next step, the following second, one after the other, and the thought of Bucky. Bucky had walked this strange country; Bucky was ahead of him; surely he knew—he had to know—that Steve would be following; that Steve would follow him to the ends of the world.

Then the jackal yipped again, the same dry laugh like a match struck and catching, and with a trick of its paws it seemed to shift at an angle and disappeared.

There was a hole in the center of the world.

Steve stood beside it, looking down, and it wasn't a hole at all: it was a staircase, whose steps were large, enormous, carved into the wood, winding down into the dark. Large enough for giants; large enough for four people to walk down abreast of each other. Each stair could take two strides across, then a sheer two-foot drop, and there was nothing at all to be seen in the below—nothing but warm air and the jackal's sharp fading laughter.

Down and down. Thor's voice was in his ears, whispering warning words. Steve hesitated. 

He took a step, and then another. He descended in the dark, close enough to the wall to brush against it, listening for the jackal's faint, mad-struck laughter. After a long, long moment, he closed his fingers around Natasha's two quarters and pressed them into his palm, skin-warm and perfectly real. With each stair, the air grew softer and sweeter to breathe; with each stair, the square star-bright opening he had stepped down into was further up and away, until it was only a trace of light, which vanished, and he walked in the dark.

He had to watch his step, then. By some common sense he felt his way with his hand against the wooden wall, so that he could not stumble and pitch forward into the dark. He worked his way down, knowing too well he was too slow by half. Half of humanity, perhaps half of the _universe_ had died together in a snap of Thanos's fingers—and here was he going to meet monsters; what kind of monstrous pride was that?

Steve hoped suddenly that Stark was somewhere down there, too: Tony of all people would devise them a way home. Tony had known Thanos—or something very like Thanos—was coming to them. Ultron, Vision, perhaps even the Accords, all, all had been measures of precaution, of forewarning, against a threat he had dreaded more than he dared to say. And Steve hadn't known how to ask.

The steps became shallower.

He emerged on the side of a gigantic tree. Here the staircase became a long descending ledge; further down it resumed, curved around the trunk. It _was_ a trunk: titanic, the same dark-red wood as the desert above. Immense branches developed out of it, each twice as tall across as Steve's body, arching out into the dark. It was still dark, though not so much that he was walking blind, and the jackal had vanished, its task neatly accomplished.

 _This is a metaphor_ , Steve thought, and then:  _This is a_ tree.

He felt half-blind with the vertigo of it. He thought of Thor, telling mythical tales to them of an evening, when he had been sad and lonely for his home: poetic prose of Yggdrasil, world-tree, ash-tree, whose roots were planted into wells of intelligence and wisdom, and within which there lived stags, eagles, and dragons. He thought of the books of Aztec mythology he'd kept on his D.C. bookshelves, and of the faded words of Genesis, in the sermons at church he and his ma had attended, long ago, in Brooklyn. Great trees. _Metaphor_ , he thought. His brain couldn't comprehend what it was living through, and it created gigantic images for him to follow, allegories, algorithms he could recognize.

There were no fruit here that he could see, nor water.

There was no ground to be seen, either.

As he went on, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he saw strange shapes move along the branches, some close, some quite distant—never so near that he could make them out. They were moving shadows; but some spoke in low cries in the distance, or voices, crackling and trembling and fading, called out to him. Once or twice he stopped, listening. They sounded like the warning calls of something lost.

Steve was not thinking about that.

There was only one way down. The branches were too far and too low for him to step onto; and although Steve could probably have made the jump, he had no intention of meeting whoever were walking them, nor of finding whatever worlds the branches led to. But he grew increasingly persuaded that these _were_ worlds—dimensions, as Thor had said—and that this tree, metaphor or no, stood at the epicenter of a very old and very strange cosmos. No more stars overhead; no more skies; no earthland to be seen; only the tree, forever and forever down.

Hours happened. Perhaps not. But perhaps. He walked on, and he felt no hunger, no thirst, neither exhaustion nor pain; his body, having swallowed Thor's honey-mead, had entered a stasis-state—physical fatigue was suspended midair, or had been left back in the world of the living, it hadn't followed him down. But his senses were sharp, more acute than even Erskine's serum had made them. He could hear and see everything that was to be seen and heard.

Even then, the sound of great wings beating the air came long, long before the bird came into sight.

He watched it fly into existence: it was immense, perhaps thirty feet wide from wingtip to wingtip, and mottled brown, with a sharp, open beak. It lowered itself to a branch a yard or two below Steve, and he thought it was an eagle until it folded its wings and looked at him with eyes the size of Steve's head; and he knew then, inescapably, what it was.

He was breathing shallowly now. The falcon looked at him.

"Sam," he said, and in response the great bird opened his gigantic wings. With a strangled cry he closed them around him, engulfing him in soft black darkness. Steve felt his body fall into his embrace.

 

* * *

 

Nightflight.

1944\. An overnight freight aircraft over the Mediterranean, back from a mission in Morocco, pressed in close quarters between slumbering Gabe Jones and Bucky and a pile of powder cartridges in canvas-packages all crowded together against the trembling sides of the plane, the air roaring around them and the pilot in his little cabin, barely visible up against the dark sky. Steve, staring down at the notebook in his hands with a little graphite pencil against his thumb—he had been drawing a gigantic bird he thought, some nightmarish creature, its wingspan the size of—the size of—no; it was gone; he shook the thought away. They were bound for London. He closed his eyes.

Then opened them: Bucky, beside him, had struck a match, and in the dim light his face was soft and tired, his eyes downcast, his lashes very dark against his cheek. He lit his smoke and shook off the flame, and they fell back into near-darkness, so that Steve could only make out the lines of his body, his elbows resting on his knees, his fingers around the cigarette. He swallowed the smoke. His left shoulder and his flank were resting against Steve's, very hot, almost feverish, and he smelled hard of sweat and gunpowder and the taste of malt whiskey.

His voice, too, was hoarse. "Want one?"

"Sure." Steve put away the notebook with shaking fingers, taking the offered cigarette. Bucky's hand brushed his with a shock of static.

He leaned in, and Bucky tilted his head and let him light his cigarette to his own, his eyes half-closed, watching him.

"Alright?"

"Yeah, Rogers. I'm alright."

The smoke tasted sweet, and bitter underneath, earthy.

Bucky tilted his head against the partition. "You ever gonna show me that notebook of yours?"

"—I dunno, Buck." He was uneasy; he'd never really known where to stand here, what with—drawing. Art. It wasn't something he was especially proud of; it was just something that was. Sure, he'd drawn Bucky time and again, asleep and awake and dreaming, he knew the angles of Bucky's face better than he knew his own. He'd taken down the lines of Bucky's body in strong black nervous strokes: his shoulderblades, his arms, the shadows of his hipbones and the muscle of his solid thighs, his body made strong and lean by garagework and boxing and basic training. Steve had made anatomy studies out of him, and Bucky had never spoken a word against it, though Steve knew that he knew. It had been a covenant between them, unspoken and undemanding.

Except now Bucky was. Demanding. Steve grappled for something to say, and found nothing at all. He stared at Bucky, Bucky his best pal, his sergeant, his ambush in the woods, the best fella he'd ever known. He was—he didn't know why, but it was real and strong and as painful as a broken head—overwhelmed with a feeling of loss he hadn't felt since his ma had passed. It was _grief_ , he realized, sweet like the smoke on his lips; the sort of grief you only had for someone you had lost irrevocably.

"Buck—" he said, and caught himself.

Bucky stared back at him and said, "I swear, Rogers, you _do_ go to fucking pieces when I'm not around; where were you in your head just now?" and Steve pressed his shoulder against his, turned his head and pushed it against Bucky's and blinked back sudden tears.

 

* * *

 

His hands were touching something feathery and silk-like; then they were feathers; he had full handfuls of them, and the great bird was soaring beneath him—he could feel every minute shift of his wings. _Oh_ , he thought, _Sam_ , and then again: _Sam, Sam_. A minute ago he had been on a derelict airplane over the dark sea of Europe, and his throat was still sore from the sweet, sweet smoke. Bucky had never been so close. Gone, now, already, again. He was dead, and Sam was dead.

Steve leaned his forehead against the powerful neck, and the bird—the shadow of his friend—called out a heavy cry that seemed to echo against the walls of the giants' valley. At the bottom, far below, lay forests dark blue, and the glistening ribbon of a stream, which widened, until they followed it towards the waterfall: it was the mouth of the valley between two peaks of stone.

They were a gate, a giants' gate. Though it seemed monstrous large the tips of the bird's wings just brushed the sides of the rock when it soared past. Steve was had no fear of falling. It was enough to feel the strange heat of a trusted body carrying him.

The great wings beat on either side of him. Slowly they began their descent, long gliding circles down and down.

Then Steve began to see: flatland, grassland, immense plains that rippled dark green underneath them like a sea from the mouth of the stone-gate. A rock as tall as a man stood a distance away, and the falcon extended its great claws, rearing its head back, beating the wind, until it landed, gathering its wings beneath him. Steve slipped to the ground almost without a sound.

The grass was thick, a deep blue-green, and came up to his waist. In the slow dawning light Steve looked up at the bird, and knew there could be no company, wherever he was going. Sam could only take him part of the journey: perhaps he, too, was only a metaphor, a representation of what Steve had lost. But he had come to him, first of all those who were gone: Sam had found him when he had been wandering lost. How much longer would he have walked endlessly down the staircase of the tree? Sam had been pararescue, in another life.

"Thanks," he said, mostly because he didn't know what the hell else to say. The massive bird-head lowered towards him. Steve put his hand against the rough beak, then put his cheek next to his hand. He'd have given anything, then, just to go a little ways further with him.

Then the falcon reared up, and his tall dark eyes fixed upon Steve he opened his beak and he said, _"Be … ware … Beware … "_

It was a poor approximation of Sam's voice, a rusty, rasping croak. Already there was no time left to them: the terrifying wings opened again, and the bird took flight, black like a cross against the sky.

Steve watched him until he had gone.

The sun was rising.

It was a strange, red sun, much larger than anything he'd ever seen on Earth. The sky, too, was the wrong colour—a deep ochre-brown, like Thor's honey-mead, which slowly lightened to fine gold. The grass a profound green. It felt like being on a different planet—an alien sky like those in the books Bucky had loved once, and perhaps still did; and Steve, walking on, towards the mountains who crossed the far horizon, gigantic and blue in the distance, thought of the trenches of Europe in 1944, and the skies of their nighttime missions, purple and bruised. He thought of storm lanterns and their rare campfires, of Morita's old crackling radio, of cold rations, hard Irish whiskey, and the icy black forests of Germany and Austria, where they had hunted monsters. It was growing warm.

The sun rose full, though it remained strangely low, suspended in the windless, hot air, and still Steve walked on, untiring. He was neither hungry nor thirsty nor struck dumb by the extraordinary landscape, and he did not know how long he had traveled—the mountains looked no closer, but from time to time he encountered tall blackened trees, their branches twisted and torn and trailing toward the ground, and their trunks split open as though struck by lightning. They looked dead and strange in the lush grasslands.

He was not certain when he became persuaded that something was following him in the prairie. But his breath came faster, and though he kept his eyes firmly on the far distant point of the blue mountains, he strained to hear: a slithering noise like something dry and crackled running over the earth …

It was close and then closer, crawling about the openings to his brain, and abruptly Steve broke into a run.

It was already upon him. He could just glimpse at it out the corners of his eyes—something gigantic and long-legged, with talon-like hands that stretched out around him, as though it meant to cross around his path and snag him from the earth; something with a _mouth_ , something with a rasping breath, something hungry and powerful, more powerful by far than he, and full of rage.

He ran until the mountain range was immense above him, towering, a ghastly blue; he stumbled over thick black roots from the gathering trees, and heard the breath of the dreadful creature in his ear.

Then his ankle caught on some gnarled branch in his path, and even in falling he rolled into himself and landed on his feet, facing backwards, his back flat against the rock.

He had only time to see a mass of thick festering limbs, reaching out and out through towards him—had only time to brace himself and to long for his shield—before the creature was hurled to the ground with a screech of maniacal mirth, and a gigantic beast, black all over with eyes of gold, landed silently upon it and tore at its throat.

Great jaws closed around rotting flesh, and the panther ripped it open.

He, too, was gigantic. He crunched its bones, feasted on its muscles and tendons, and devoured its guts; it rent its chalky skin to pieces with ferocious claws. When the many-legged being twitched no longer, he lifted his fine, feline head, and looked at Steve.

There was dark blood on his teeth, and blood on its gleaming black fur. He paced in absolute silence, backing Steve against the wall of rock, and Steve thought of Okoye: _my king could have turned you away, and he did not._

But there was no time for shame or guilt, nor even for any useless, meaningless apology: from the grasslands there already came three more shadows, emerging in waves from in between the twisting trees, long hooking feelers lashing towards them; in the air was a silent, horrible hissing. The panther spat, his fur bristling hard. His ears were flat back against his head.

Then T'Challa turned, and said, in his own voice: "You must go. I will guard the way."

With a lazy swipe of one enormous paw he tore Steve's stomach open; he hurled him backwards into the stone.

 

 

### Third Gate.

In another life he might have found Bucky in Bucharest; mighta found him in Istanbul or Rio or Oslo or Dubai; in any of the dank hiding-places where Bucky spent a few weeks, a month at most, before abandoning them, moving ahead moving forward and never looking back. But it was in Bucharest he had stayed the longest, and afterwards he had told Steve—falteringly, in the rough hoarse voice of one disused to talking long—that he had thought he could remake a semblance of a life there. One month in he had had a toothbrush in neon orange, a working lightbulb in a slowly corroding fridge, a couple of granola bars on the countertop. On Fridays there had been a market down the road. He'd palmed ripe fruit in his left hand and relearned touch that was not violent: peaches, cherries, tangerines, and plums.

Steve had imagined it: showing up wearing jeans and a leather jacket, without shield or weapon; without any kind of backup whatsoever. He'd have brought apple pie. The history books had got it all wrong: it had been Bucky's favorite. They'd have split it, steaming hot, and eaten it burning on their tongues, ravenously, deliciously, same as they had as boys, when apples were scarce and spice even rarer. Everything had got different. Milk was lighter and thinner, without the creaminess, the tart aftertaste they'd been used to; flour was white and fine and almost bland; even sugar was sweeter, sharper, and lingered longer on the tongue, like a caramelized treat.

In Wakanda the food had been spicy and rich, meat stews and chunky flatbreads and sour goat's milk; they had eaten together before Bucky had gone under; and Bucky had said—

"That's a far fucking cry from K-rations—"

—but very softly, whispering it, like he wasn't sure he remembered it right, and Steve had wrapped an arm around him hard and Bucky had clasped his hand over his wrist and they had sat, silent and unhappy and restless, unable to eat from a feast made for kings. In the depths of the blue mountains Steve remembered that moment in absolute and immaculate detail: the weight of Bucky's chest against his own, the late-night smell of him in the early hours before dawn broke, his own desperate helplessness. He could have done nothing but let him go.

He wondered now what the afterworld's food could be; dreadful, though none of it would ever taste as dreadful as canned ham and bouillon packets and spam, not if it turned to ash on his tongue. _Fruit. Meats. Bread. Whatever they offer you_ , Thor had said, _refuse it_. But he knew if Bucky had eaten it he would not turn it away.

 

* * *

 

"Um. Captain America? Sir?"

Steve was walking. Had he stopped? He didn't remember. He walked in the dark, and next to him was a chittering, a skittering of many claw-like feet, and something furry and soft that brushed against his hand.

"Cap? C'mon, man, answer me, don't let me hanging here—" It was a boy's voice, young and soft on the edge of a whine, and, for all that, oddly familiar.

"You—" His mouth tasted like soil. His feet dragged over the rock. He struggled to place the voice: his brain, as perfectly recalibrated by Erskine's serum as could be called a miracle, never forgot anyone. He had never forgot a single face, not a single body—everyone dead or alive he ever had met, crowding into his mind … The skittering resumed, on the other side of him, and the boy said,

"Come on, Cap, you _know_ me, right?"

He did. "Spider," he murmured, through dumb lips. A kid from Queens playing at war.

"Yeah!" Then a pause that somehow, even down in the realm of the dead, managed to sound awkward. "Literally, now, I guess. Which is kind of gross."

A furry leg touched the back of his hand tentatively, and as Steve's heart gave an enormous thump he stumbled, he caught himself with one hand, he scrambled back up.

"Oops. Sorry. Sorry!"

The darkness was almost total. But still Steve thought he could just catch the outline beside him of a— _an arachnid_ —high as his waist, whose long bristly legs scurried on the stone. It had a boy's head. It had a boy's head and it had too many eyes. Steve walked on. He felt his way through, holding his side: the panther's claws had torn through skin and muscle as easily as through silk; blood was staining his fingers, dripping in black pools at his feet.

"Oh shit, you're _hurt_." The boy-spider chittered in alarm—it was a rough soft sound, almost like a cat's purr. "Shit. Shitshitshit. Uh. What can I do?"

"Nothing," Steve said. "It'll heal. It always does."

"It doesn't look like it's healing."

"It will."

The boy-spider was briefly silenced. "Uh. Cap—not meaning to be rude, or, but—are _you_ dead?"

"No. I don't—know." But he felt again the panther's terrible claws, and Sam-falcon's gigantic wings, unfolding around him, dragging him forth into darkness. Two small deaths. He dragged in a hard breath. "Probably."

"Oh. 'Cause I was hoping—yeah. Mister Stark said you'd probably be alright on Earth—"

Tony. On Earth … "Is he down here?" he rasped.

"I dunno. I don't _think_ so. He was still back there when I died." The boy's voice wobbled on a brave, high note. "Different planet, though. Uh. Titan? I think? There were aliens. I _think_ they were aliens. One of them definitely wasn't an alien and one of them was a _wizard_ —"

Conversation in the world of the dead with a colossal spider took rather more out of him than Steve knew how to give. "Where does this go?" he murmured—his throat felt like sandpaper—and the path was troublesome, now, a craggy, jagged terrain, rough with bedrock, and low over his head. There was no light, but only a faint lightness at the outskirts of his vision, grayish-white and moving in and out of sight.

"I haven't gone so far—I don't—I woke up and I was like _this_ and _you_ —" Its feeble voice died away uncertainly. "I think I'm here for you," it said very quietly. "I … I don't think I'm real, Cap."

 _I don't think I am, either_. Panting, Steve leaned his shoulder against the stone, heaved in another dry breath, and closed his eyes. He wanted for one moment. One minute.

"Uh, man, sorry, sorry, I mean—Cap—you don't look so good."

"I'm fine," he said. That was just another death, rising up to meet him.

With a noise of distress the boy-spider skittered away, and darkness fell back about Steve like a curtain—it took him a few seconds to understand that the pale luminescence that had followed them had come from the creature itself; something about the eyes … after it had gone he felt more easy, as though some of the tension he had felt had lifted from his shoulders. But solitude wrapped around him like a cloak. He had felt nothing but trust for the Sam-falcon, and T'Challa in panther form had protected him from—whatever the smog-wreathed beings on the plain lands had been; before he had killed him. This strange monstrous boy-thing who spoke with a Queens accent, he couldn't—couldn't grapple with it properly. It was comically wrong. It was disgusting, hateful. He swallowed back bile and tried not to think of Bucky.

He sat in the dark. After a time his flesh grafted itself back together underneath his fingers. Wherever he was, Erskine's serum was always triumphantly at work in his DNA. He wiped away the blood on his fingers and slowly hauled himself back to his feet.

Thin claws tripped timidly a few yards away, and he saw the spider-creature work cautiously its way up and around a boulder, greyish-green and phosphorescent about the two-parted body. Steve didn't look into the eyes—any of the eyes.

"Captain Rogers—shit, shit, okay, you're healed, _great_ , I don't know what to call you—"

"Steve is fine," Steve said tightly.

"Right, so, there's an opening back over _there_ , and I think there's—people? There's _noises_." The boy lifted a frizzy leg, and pointed, as though he meant to guide him through.

Steve followed. Slowly the gorge opened, and the passage grew higher, easier to manage, until finally he found a trail underfoot, a thin pathway that descended abruptly into a wider cavern. At the far end of the cavern stood colossal carved gates of a dark, heavy plate, sculpted into the rock.

On either side of the gates stood scorpions of enormous size.

"Ah, shit," said the boy-spider. "That's. Not people."

They, too, looked as though they were made of metal—silver, Steve thought, silver mottled ghastly white-blue. They gleamed an unearthly, ultraviolet glow. Gigantic plates overlapping one another moved very, very slowly; perhaps they inhabited a timeframe different to their own; but they did move, and by the time Steve had jumped down to the bottom of the gorge ("Cap, I don't wanna be lame but are you _sure_ , I don't think these guys are gonna be very happy if you wake them up") they had reared slightly upwards, and the scales of their tails scattered angles of light across the hollow chamber. Great eyes, multiple eyes, like black beads, opened to watch them. _Full of eyes all around_ … But their telsons were a darker allium, poised to sting, and as Steve approached they backed up further in menace, crossed together as though to bar the way.

"Uh," said the boy-spider, "Cap?"

The left scorpion fanned its barbed claws, and its flexing tail sent echoes of light in ricochets across the heavy toll of the gates. It hissed at them a high, stridulated sound with a taste of melancholy—like a distress call, like a warning sign.

"Oh," said the boy-spider. "I got that. I _got_ that." The joy of it dissolved as in water. "Um. It says you can't go through."

"Tough going," Steve said. He took a step forward.

Another sibilant vibration, which held in the air for a moment before dying out. "If you go on, you must either be a god or very—stupid," the boy-spider translated. "Uh. Rude." Then the stridulant voice came faster and harsher, and it tripped over itself to continue: "If you go on you must pay the price of passage. For therein—therein? _really?_ —for _therein_ is the realm of the dead, oh shit, oh shit, and no man or woman may pay who wishes to return to … I don't know that word, I think it means _surface_ or maybe _shallow_ or _season_ , I'm not sure … you will walk in darkness absolute … you will journey through the dark for double twelve hours."

"Fine," said Steve. His own tiredness was catching up. His indefatigable motion had slowed; his body, once wounded, now felt pain acutely; and he could hear it, his fatigue, pad-footed, patient, gaining territory upon him with each passing minute.

"I don't think I can go with you," said the boy-spider, its many legs gathering uncertainly underneath its full-bellied body. "I don't _want_ to go with you. But … "

"Tell them to open the gates," Steve said.

"I'm pretty sure it understands you," said the boy-spider. And without a sound the heavy carved gates turned slowly inward. It whimpered. "I _really_ don't want to go with you."

Within was a great, velvety blackness. Nothing, not their voices, not even the luminous, numinous glow of the scorpions's bodies, could penetrate it—not a gleam, not a fragment of light, nor a trace of wind. Steve looked back at the boy-spider, who looked petrified, numb.

"I don't," it said, "I don't—I—are you going to come back?"

He was so young. Scared to the marrow. There was nothing he could do for the boy. He would either disappear after Steve had gone, or remain here to roam the caverns of the blue mountains. There was nothing for it but to keep walking; abandon him to the scorpions.

"Stay here," Steve said, and the gigantic beasts scampered slowly aside, letting him pass as he walked into the dark.

 

* * *

 

1936 Brooklyn Fulton Street near the water, sunlight over the sea—

Steven Rogers, frail-boned, hollow-boned, woke at six every morning to drudge to the printing house south of Cobble Hill where he put together type and helped set the noontime edition, and during his breaks scribbled in the margins of cheap pulpy notebooks because where else to draw—then returned in the hot early summer evening with his hands deep in his pockets and his hat on his head, thinking he might take the trolleys down to the water to meet Bucky. Brooklyn around him like a living thing: her open alleys and courtyards and people shouting invectives from window to window; the drumfire of the elevated railway over Hudson Ave down to Coney Island; children everywhere, playing, drawing on sidewalks smeared with chalk, and sometimes stealing a little, too, their yells from alley to alley like sparrows crying. The smell of food rising in the evenings, and the stench of summer days among the brick workhouses. July in Brooklyn so hot the dust rose up in clouds and clogged up the drains, Brooklyn that wasn't New York, starving, hungry, foul-mouthed Brooklyn …

Light fractured in the cracked stained glass windows of the brick-red church they attended on Sundays, the Barneses wearing their best and Steve turning up among them like a bad penny. The thin, fine pages of the prayer-book, the smell of incense, thickly rising, and the hard black wood of the kneeling pews. Faith was something you didn't argue much about but also didn't think much about. God was an immaterial abstract, an omniscient all-father you never imagined you'd get to meet: until you did meet the Allfather's sons—one fair and the other dark—and faith fractured like the light. But this hadn't happened yet. In 1936 Steve Rogers was nineteen years old and lately motherless and in love with his best friend, and thought dark thoughts during mass.

Buck, Bucky, Bucky. All he could think about. He caught himself sketching, rapidly, guiltily, the slope of his shoulders and the line of his back under his grease-stained undershirt, his well-made hands, his laughing mouth.

Bucky worked garagework. They needed more hands in the spring through August, when people took the cars out and engines rattled slow and broke down quick. Some evenings Steve took the trolleys down to meet him; they had hash browns and toffee cakes and hard black coffees in the late-night Automat across the way.

Bucky at twenty, young and handsome, had loved to dance—and there were nights, after, when they'd walk down to the palace with its windows bright and its soda fountains, singing the blues and Frank Sinatra. Never needed for partners, Bucky Barnes. Never needed more than a smile and a shrug. He wore a crisp white shirt and suspenders, his hair damp with sweat for dancing the Shag and the Big Apple, and afterwards bought them a malt shake maybe—but he claimed to be a gentleman, and walked the girls to their doors with a charmer's smile. Sometimes he returned to Steve's tenement flat with a hangdog expression and a funny look on his face, like he'd done too much thinking, and sometimes he stared at Steve with his fist against his mouth, frowning, unhappy, drinking black coffee at midnight at the table.

Then he walked to the window and opened it out into the hot night, and cranked up the radio for a song. Steve, for once silent, watched him light a cigarette and lean out. He'd known then he'd remember these evenings however long he lived. Windows open, lamps burning. Radio. The flat smelled like turpentine and printing ink, and Bucky like petrol and metal—same way he'd smell, many years afterwards, in the dark trenches of Europe: gunpowder and shoe polish and hair pomade. Steve would have known his body in the dark. He would have known him anywhen, anywhere, to the ends of the world.

 

* * *

 

His fatigue caught up to him like a dog, lapping him easily, matching his pace, yapping at his heels, laughing at him. He walked in the darkness, absorbed, for a long time, against a hot wind. The way was open before him; he had no fear of falling. But his steps were slow and his legs were leaden, and he began to think that he would wander the underground halls of the world until his old death, too, caught up with him.

He thought again and again of Sam and T'Challa and the boy-spider. Each of them had come to him in time of need: when he might have walked down the great tree forever; when the smog-wreathed many-limbed creatures on the grasslands might have snared him in; when the scorpion-beings might have pierced him through and poisoned him, or refused to open him the doors. But he suspected there would be no more aid: whatever lay ahead he would have to face on his own.

After many hours awake—how many more sleeping? he wondered; how long had he wandered the long hot halls of the dead?—nonetheless, he came into the orchard.

It was no orchard he had ever seen before. Brooklyn boy through and through, he had rarely wished to go into the country. But these trees were strange things: not the ragged, torn trunks he had seen on the grasslands, but low-hanging branches full with fruit, falling globe-like about the trunks like small worlds of their own. When he walked past them, they rustled; and in their murmur he thought he heard distant voices. He did not recognize their fruit. They were lush and pomegranate red, but smaller, and shaped as acorns.

Hunger sprang in his belly, hunger as he'd never known—not even, he thought, in the worst of the thirties, when food had been scarce and cheaply treasured; when his ma would make stew out of beef bones' marrow and dumplings out of stale bread. Hunger desperate, hard in the mouth and hard in the gut. Soup lines. Shelters. Men sold their last breath for a hot cup of java and a sandwich.

What hurt could it do, to reach out and pluck a single fruit from a single branch? He staggered madly on.

The orchard changed as he walked: then there were trees as tall as pines, whose berries were the blue of electric beetles. They had begun to fall from the branches, and they, too, wanted eating. Then cones cracked open like chestnuts, the flesh within golden-brown and hot. Then extraordinary branches of briar and thorn, bearing lamp-like raspberries.

Then bushes of lavender and lilac, reaching high to the thighs, and slowly moving in a wind that he could not feel. As he stepped through them some were crushed underfoot, and the scent of them rose thick and violet.

Then a pool of singing water, and he nearly reached down, and ran his hand through it; he caught himself at the last moment. His throat was parched. He wavered there for a long time.

There was no sun: only a dim light that cast a silver, mercurial glow over his path. The sky was no sky. Only boundless distance in every direction; only the ground beneath his feet, and that too, he thought, was meaningless. The tree—he was still on the tree; this was nothing _but the tree_ —was offering him images, cameos of reality that played off his expectations. He walked past them, the orchard and the lilac and the pool, until they were long behind him, and the way was again dark.

He came, very slowly, upon the river Thor had told him he should meet; it appeared to him in the distance, until quite suddenly it lay before him at the bottom of a valley. A clean and intoxicating smell, like that of poppies in hot summer, rushed up around him. The river was pale and still, and appeared to go on forever. Of the far off shore there was no sign: only the mirror-like surface of the water, on and on. The creek was of smooth, black stones, no larger than a quarter, strangely warm.

He had only to walk down to the water before he saw the boat; and of course there was a boat, moored and waiting. Two people sat in it very straight, whose hands moved swiftly over a wooden and complicated board, though neither of them looked at it.

One was grim-faced and heavily cloaked: only its hands, marked with black sigils, moved visibly. His body was otherwise perfectly immobile; he stared in the vacant distance with eyes black and devoid of meaning. Steve found that he couldn't look away from it without soon forgetting its features. Long afterwards, he would forget almost its existence. The second player was dark of hair, familiar. His skin was a pale, striated blue. His eyes, red. He looked up quickly upon Steve's approach.

"Loki," Steve sighed; of course: of course it would be Loki, who delighted even in death in causing trouble.

"Captain," Loki replied, lip curling. Then curiously, like a cat: "My brother has sent you."

There was something vaguely surreal to the act of conversing with one's mortal enemy and one's friend's dearly mourned brother, both at once. Steve said shortly, "He has."

Loki tilted his head, then without looking shot out his hand and swept a pawn across the board, replacing another, and curled his long fingers around it. "So: you have failed, and Thanos has prevailed. Is this," he sighed, "what my sacrifice was for?"

"You were heroic," said Steve dryly, "at the last."

The first player removed the foremost pawn via a complex pass of his hand. "Ah," said Loki, frowning. "An unfortunate contretemps. Uncharacteristic of me."

"He mourns you," said Steve, and saw Loki's oddly-made, blue-tinged face tighten momentarily. He turned away.

"Do you seek passage?"

"If I can get it."

"If you can pay for it."

Steve, caught, rooted in his pockets for the two quarters Natasha had given him. Loki laughed, hard-edged and bitter. "Ah, yes; a primitive understanding of payment." But the first player had risen, and now beckoned. "Regrettable: you wouldn't happen to have a sow about you, or cakes of barley and honey?—Never mind; you must swallow them."

"Swallow—"

"Yes," said Loki, a thread of impatience now in his voice; "unless you wish the ferryman to seam them in for your eyes."

Steve paused. He put each quarter one after the other in his mouth, and swallowed them: each one went down like a little sun in his gut. And he stepped onto the boat, which set out directly, though without a whimper, upon the still silver water, and not a ripple altered its surface.

"What did _you_ pay?" he asked, when the silence became immeasurable, and Loki seemed content to sit quiet and brooding.

"I have no payment to offer." Sourly. "My body was not burned on the funeral pyre, nor were my ashes cast across the firmament sea; as I am no warrior, nor truly Aesir, I am not to be permitted in Valhalla, where my father resides. No: my brother will not find me there when he, too, perishes. I am Jotun giant and misbegotten, and so bound for my sister's realm, where only the half-dead and the half-made and the half-sacred go. I do _not_ cherish the prospect." He smiled thinly at Steve. "Nor should you, truly. She and I did not part lately on happy terms. But only if I win a single game of _sjak_ against the ferryman will I be permitted to go back." He smiled a thin, awful smile. "Do not trust gods, Captain. We always cheat."

Steve glanced at the board, across which the game was continued: strange pawns and figures contorted in demonstrative horror, snakes winding their bodies crosswise, coins in small piles, and others scattered.

"How many of these did you play?"

"Three million six hundred thousand eight hundred and seventy four," said Loki, precise. "Oh, yes. Should you return to your world, Captain, you may find many years gone."

Steve swallowed back against something dark and pungent. The boat cut through the water like a sword. But now it grew darker. The _water_ grew wilder, hotter, hotter still until it boiled, and the barge roiled, threatening to overflow. The board remained perfectly motionless; not a pawn stirred. The ferryman's tall dark figure at the heft was serene.

"Ah," said Loki, peering into the depths. "Hmm."

Steve caught himself against the side of the craft. It was taking on water. Already it threatened to capsize—

Then the water was no longer water—but gigantic scales that turned under his palm, and, circling on, caught them in a roiling maelstrom; and the river was overhead, the water-that-was-not was all about them, silver-green and deadly.

"Ah. Jörmungandr," Loki pronounced, with perfect clarity, as though he routinely hitched a ride on the backs of giant serpents. He sounded goddamn fond. "You let your children out of your sight for a mere millennium—"

_"Children?"_

"Well, he's grown a bit since I last saw him; but then, I was fair busy giving birth … Now, don't move. I daresay he will grow calmer if I let him eat you."

"What," said Steve, flat, and Loki pushed him backwards into the water. 

 

 

### Fourth Gate.

Steve sank.

Around him the serpent's rings narrowed in long, slow circles; the surface yielded underneath him, grasped at him and pulled him down. He fell, down and down into the dark. Above him the water was fracturing with light—like—stained glass windows—Our Lady of the Shipwrecked—Brooklyn, hymn and prayer and kneeling on the hard black pews—brightness fragmenting, echoing, dissolving; sound was going softer and softer the further down he sank.

His ribcage heaved; he breathed out the last of his air and swallowed the water. It tasted acrid and thick, like liquid tar, and it slid down his throat and clogged into his lungs.

Distantly he knew that, if he was not dead yet, the water alone would not be enough to kill him. His body, once so frail, was now too strong; his lungs would expel the water, push it out the way his muscles pushed out bullets; his heart would start over and stop and start over, his brain backfiring and backfiring, again and again and again, in an endless desperate bid to keep him alive. It would be the sinking, eventually, that killed him. He would die for a very long time.

In the water, in the dark, the past happened upon him in hot flashes: winter '32: the burning stove beside his deathbed, when even ma had despaired, and gone to find a priest who'd perform the last rites, and Bucky had read to him in fits and bursts of feverish worry fantastic stories from her bible—Jeremiah, Joseph at the bottom of the well, Jonah in the belly of the great fish. Bucky had held his hand that awful night, had kept it pressed against his mouth as no boy dared, had held him hard when the worst of the wracking coughs had threatened to break his ribcage, and fed him a little warm milk.

Selfish, greedy, Steve had not pushed him away. Bucky's bony sixteen-years-old body had radiated warmth. He would do well to die in Bucky's arms. But he had heard his friend fiercely whisper, when he ought to have been asleep: _only, only let him live, only let him go, let him go let him not die in this bed while I'm watching—_

 

* * *

 

Bucky had been happy in Wakanda.

A fugitive, a vigilante, wanted on half the countries on earth, Steve had traveled light. He'd met Natasha in Prague; Sam, in Tokyo; Wanda, in Bombay. And when Bucky had awoken from the cryo chamber—the chambers of his brain taken out for parts and dismantled and put back together by the smartest mind in the world, and somehow someway he was still the same guy, still Steve's despite all odds—nevertheless he had refused to join them. He'd wanted, of all things: peace.

 _I'm done, Steve. I'm out._ But he'd left it unsaid with uncommon courtesy:

_I can't watch you die._

They had had a few phone calls, across the length of continents, like the distance between stars. There were nights he called just for them to sit in silence on either end of the line, listening to each other breathe. . Hot flashes, flashes of light, painful, like windows on a train, signals on an old radio, passing hard, fast, fast, and then faster.

 

* * *

 

The war— The war had changed him; changed them both. Steve, too, in every way including the obvious, but Bucky—Bucky after Zola had been a quieter, more somber man. His cocksure confidence had melted into something more definite: an awareness of his own body, of its abilities and its limitations—how easily it could kill, and how damnably easily it could be cracked open, like a nut. At night when they'd slept folded up for warmth on a cot he'd felt dangerously brittle, and the lines of his ribcage and his spine were hard and cutting. He had lost so much weight. There had been lines on his body where the flesh had been parted and seared, lines underneath his skin where his bones had been snapped and put back and had not been properly set.

When they were head-deep in filthy, muddy trenches half covered in snow and frost, almost out of bullets and half-starved on dwindling K-rations, half-starved for human contact and warmth except for Dernier's crackling radio and a little hot plate on which to heat up the last of their coffee, Bucky had sat on a crate, his rifle slung over his splayed thighs. His mouth had looked dark, etched deep in his face, and his eyes sunken in. There were hours when he did nothing but look at Steve. He looked half-known and half a stranger; sometimes Steve watched back, unafraid and tired, and Bucky's mouth crooked in his old evening smile, his old Brooklyn smile.

The war, the war, the war had been London, monstrous city, giant city, labyrinthine, nothing like they'd ever known: blackout hours and air-raid shelters and the dark little hotel they had been holed up in, whose—of all things—claw-footed bathtub miraculously still had hot water running. It had been a general's mistress's suite, recommissioned for Captain America: all the best for the best of men, or very nearly. Savior of a generation, said the WACs and the GIs, at headquarters, even though the brass had looked dubious and more than a little crass. But in the hotel near Earl's Court Bucky had taken one look at the bed and said, "I ain't staying in outtown camp, pal. That bed's a sweetheart, it's calling my name," and burrowed in without so much as taking off his uniform. Steve sat up with the bedside lamp on and watched him, exhausted himself and unable to rest, his own body now too big for his bones. When Bucky woke up ten hours later he was tender about the edges, staring up at Steve with perplexed admiration: "Hey, Captain America, when'd you step out down? You slumming with us mortals?"—which, god— _god_ , Bucky didn't know; Bucky never knew that in a year he would be dead; as good as dead.

Steve was silent, stricken; and slowly he watched his friend recognize him.

"Steve," Bucky said, after a while, gazing muzzily up at him. He touched Steve's sleeve. "Steve." Dryly, Steve said: "Yeah, Buck."

"You're a reckless motherfucker."

"I'm sorry," Steve said, "I'm sorry. I couldn't let you—" in a strangled, unhappy voice he didn't recognize, "I couldn't let you _die_ , Buck; it wasn't right."

"Shoulda," Bucky murmured, dark-eyed. Then, exhaustedly, he rolled onto his back and put his hand over his face: he'd almost been crying.

"Couldn't. You don't know," Steve said, after a miserable pause, "hearing about you dead; hearing your name. It would've—" _killed me_ , he nearly said, but didn't, and Bucky heard it, anyhow.

"Sure. Nearly did. Two of us dead instead of one: a bargain." Bucky pushed himself up, pulled himself up, looked wild and tousled and aching all over as he got to his feet and started taking his clothes off. Steve's gaze glanced off the red angry gash that split his collarbone down to his pectorals, the violet bruises that bloomed like dark poppies over his chest. "I'm taking a bath," he announced, and went into the bathroom, and after a minute came back out and dragged Steve in by the throat. "Hot water!" he croaked, delighted and trying to hide it, laughter in his mouth even as he tried to frown. As—though they entangled themselves fighting like puppies for the soap—they manhandled one another into the tub they somehow found themselves naked and pressed together, head to foot.

"Huh," Bucky said. He traced the curve of Steve's pectorals with the side of his thumb, then absently licked it. Nighttime sweat and sulphur. Steve nosed behind his ear, grasped at him, and finally held him, hard against his chest, his arms around his waist, and Bucky hummed a meaningless tune in his ear, holding at his shoulders, absurdly caressing: it ought to have been the other way around. "'s alright. You're still you, aren't you?"

"Dunno," Steve said, half-laughing and half-sad, "I really don't, Buck," and then blinked and tried to pull away: he was growing hard against Bucky's hip. The shame of it.

"Huh," Bucky said again, grunted, and pushed his thigh between Steve's thigh and grasped his head between his hands. "Shut up," he murmured, "shut up, shut up—kiss me, look—" guiding him until Steve's mouth found his mouth; he was hard, too; and he kissed sweet and hot as anything. Gasping, grasping, they found a semblance of purchase: Bucky's ass, his thighs, his shoulders; Bucky's fingers in his hair; Bucky mouthing against his jaw and then his throat. They worked against one another. Bucky lifted his head, and Steve, helplessly aroused, met him again for long slow heady kisses, drank deep from his mouth, until breathlessly Bucky turned his head into his shoulder and swore.

"You're all _changed_ , pal," Bucky said, his voice twisting as though Steve were an Irish changeling, but with his hands he stroked down the planes of Steve's chest, palms flat, struck with shock and wonder. In the hot tub he stood wavering and alert and wanting, exploring. Steve let him explore. Steve sought in turn the dark, hidden places of his body: his armpits, the soft insides of his thighs, the muscles of his ass. How many times had he seen Bucky naked before?—dozens of times, hundreds, but never before had desire knocked him right in the head and laid him down flat; he'd never wanted anyone so intensely before. Sure enough he'd known the flat broad expanse of Bucky's chest, known the work of muscle under his skin and even the dark fullness of his cock—but not the smell of him when he wanted someone, or the sounds he made when Steve wrapped his hand around him, a startled groan, a laugh—or how his ribcage expanded between Steve's hands as he pulled in a startled breath and shuddered, his heartrate going up like birdsong.

"Didn't think you'd ever come to that," he said after, "didn't think you wanted that, no more."

"Yeah, well," said Steve, and somehow packed a decade's worth of longing into a shrug.

"I thought," Bucky said, "before." He was unselfconsciously naked, arms crossed, scowling. Steve was washing off. He stepped out of the tub.

"I thought," said Bucky, "the serum. Took care of that, maybe. Got you over the line."

"Over you," Steve said, and Bucky flinched, but tilted up his head and held his ground.

"Come to that."

"Then," said Steve, "no."

Bucky looked away, and Steve knew he too felt the insanity of it: this was court-martial and dishonorable discharge in one, no job back home, ostracism, his family's outrage, for naught but a skinny kid with his suit on too big, a cheap matchbox allegory for a dark war. Bucky could've anyone, anyone. It lasted a second; but then Bucky looked back and shook his dark head, grinning, his eyes were rueful and a little pleased.

"You could've said," he said, "you know."

 

* * *

 

Steve stepped out of the train onto the platform. It departed behind him, a hard shriek and rattle of metal and spark and hard light, until looking round it had never been there, hadn't been there in days, perhaps months, perhaps years. The station was lit badly with storm lanterns and a dark uncertain electric light, and packed with people: families, children, soldiers, dogs, coats, valises—so that for a moment he thought he understood and recognized it: WWII London air-raid shelter, the sign on the wall said _Elephant and Castle_ , the stench of urine and gas and hard-made sweat—only at a second look they weren't; some of them might be, suit-wearing, hat-wearing, but some others had blue skin and some red, and some looked entirely alien, strange, and then abruptly familiar to a kid from the thirties: like covers out of _Black Mask_. He was out of air and buried underground with half of humanity. They parted before him like a sea, but he could not see the exit stairway; it seemed to go on forever.

He passed a woman with a goat's head and a child with six fingers on each hand; a man with ten arms around him, seated calmly in a posture of meditation; a dragon-like humanoid with scales the size of turtle backs; the barista who'd made a mean dark roast at a coffeeshop in Sunset Park; a child who seemed entirely human until it no longer did; a man in a gas mask, burning red eyes like the fires of hell, who grasped his arms hard and urgently said, " _Where is she?_ " and Steve said, "I don't know, I—" already moving past him, making it to the far wall. _I'm looking for my own_. The lights were hard small glowing balls. Voices were complicated, too: too many languages, too many tongues, a distant clamor that his doped-up brain struggled to understand.

Red crossed the edge of his vision like a fine thread; he turned to follow it. It was already gone. But he saw—"Peggy," he said, and had the breath fairly knocked out of him.

It was, it was. She was a woman he half-recognized, and half-not: his best girl, Peggy at 26, young and alive, he'd borne her casket into the ground—

But she had her back turned, and already she was walking away. She wasn't wearing her uniform or the bleached white of her hospital gown, or—a painful thrum in his ribcage—the pressed trousers and blouse she had been buried in. "Peggy," he said, and made to reach for her. He'd never seen her in that dark dress, little white bees, but her hair was pressed in neat, beautiful curls, and she wore her stockings with a line at the back. She was real and ordinary as a penny, real enough that he knew he would touch her if he dared. Peggy was _dead_ , dead and gone forever. And where was the evil in that? he thought; wasn't he dead, too, since he had drunk the mead from Thor's cup, since Sam-falcon had cradled him in his wings, and T'Challa had torn him open? Hadn't he drowned? Wasn't Bucky—

His heart stuttered and stopped and started again. _BuckyBucky_.

Like an old radio. He had warm in his head the half-memory of the hotel in Earl's Court where they'd camped and made love, where Bucky had let him suck him, let him put his mouth around his cock, frowning a bit, touching his hair, as though he wanted it certain, wanted to make sure it was alright—which it was, it _was_ , Bucky, _yes, yes you, yesmetoo_ —and where afterwards they'd slept, cramped together on the mattress of a large iron bedframe. He'd awoken next day with his face in Bucky's hair. He had just lived it; he was certain of it. He hadn't, though. It had been seventy years ago. Yesterday. A moment ago.

The red thread pulled him back: Peggy. She was almost gone—without looking back she was delicately picking her way through the crowd, and in a moment he would lose her. And he had wanted for a guide.

 _Metaphor_ , he thought, but he walked after her and he didn't touch her. She did not look around.

Couldn't, he realized, or she or he would—disappear, he supposed, and felt a rush of affection for her; dead and gone and far away she was still looking out for him. She was a damn sight better than any soldier who'd ever lived. She walked with certainty towards a staircase that had not been there half a second before.

Her heels clacked on the steps, _clack clack clack_ like the sound of a rifle, wooden steps, that clacked up into the dark until the light from the air raid shelter disappeared beneath them. She was still in front of him, he could tell the shape of her body in the dark, the white bees like white gold in the blackness. The smell of her in the hot evenings at headquarters when they'd talked strategy and maps—and then it was headquarters, and the arches in solid brick over his head, they were moving forward, upward, past the floor to the library shelves, past the maps room, past commands, up and up through the earth towards the ground. The air was rarefied and fine. Sounds came next: barked orders, footsteps, voices; was that Howard Stark?—and he thought he heard himself, twenty-six years old, Captain America on matchboxes and on trading cards, Captain America young and brash and bright-headed, thinking he could save the war. He'd been proud and foolish. Now he thought he could save half the world. The air tasted like alcohol and gunpowder.

Inexorably Peggy was walking on, past a doorway then another, like gates. He counted six, and then she turned a sharp left under an archway that looked like churchstone, like something out of a cathedral. _St Paul's_ , Steve thought, _a vault_ , he thought, but when they emerged at the top into the blinding sunlight it was no longer London at all: it was Grand Central Station, marble-white and immense like an indrawn breath, and the light was streaming bright through the windows onto the polished floor, the concourse and the ticket booths, the staircases and the brass clock—which was _wrong_ , he'd never been with Peggy in New York, never got to show her …

—But of course she had gone.

He felt the grief of her afresh in his ribcage, a well-known friend. He'd been grieving Peggy for so long. Red lips and long legs and a face like thunder. But that melancholy came and went: he'd done his mourning of her long ago. He was grateful. Whether or not she had been Peggy, or a shadow of her, or the image of her inside of him, she had led him through and out, out of the war and towards home.

His footsteps on the marble floor made exactly the right sound. There were people milling around, still, but these weren't the poor and ragged crowd he had seen in the air raid shelter: they were real; they were more than real; they had stepped out of the photographs of the past and come back to life. Not a single man or woman was without a hat. They were going home, home at the end of a long workday. He knew them intimately. You don't forget New York easy: New York don't let you.

New York don't let you. Steve stepped forward and saw his shadow, and then he turned and saw his dark, small reflection in the windowglass of the quadruple doors. He was wearing his old suit—too big for his bones, but it had come cheap. His hair was floppy and damp over his forehead.

Wearing his old clothes and wearing his old bones, just as he'd always done, turned out, in Bucky's eyes. Only it didn't hurt: no asthma rattling about his lungs, no early onset of arthritis, no half-twisted spinal cord. Seventy years and hurt worse than Steve could imagine, and Bucky was still kind.

There was a hat when he wanted for one, and there was a sign when he wanted for one: the Bridge rising up like a damn miracle in the high, chromatic blue of the sky. He had stepped sideways into Brooklyn, Brooklyn in hot hard summer—and Steve knew, then, where he had to go. This was Bucky's land of plenty: he had made it after all.

 

 

### Fifth Gate

He took the long way home. He'd walked for days or years since he had drunk the honey-mead from Thor's cup. Time was elastic. It was whatever he wanted it to be, or possibly whatever Bucky wanted it to be, and in the end that was about the same thing.

Dust was rising off the sidewalks. Already the heat was making sweat bead at the back of his neck, and oddly he welcomed it—it was a heat half-remembered and half-forgot; nothing had ever come close to that oppressive, exhilarating sultriness, that dryness in the mouth, making you long for lemonade and ices. Space was all folded up together. He walked from Cobble Hill into Bushwick; from Old Fulton St. to Flatbush Ave to Union St.,—the Fifth Avenue Line soaring with a clatter of wheels above Sands Street,—Webster Hall, St Mary's Episcopal, the Buchman Cantine, the Hamilton Dinner,—the Walker Theater, showing GRETA GARBO ROBERT TAYLOR in CAMILLE—a Horn and Hardart Co. Automat where they'd bought blueberry pie and egg custard—and then, suddenly, the distant spectacle of Luna Park, and, glittering, the sea. Space was malleable. Only the places that mattered a damn remained in Bucky's boundless imagination. He remembered it all better than Steve did.

Then, with a sort of saddened longing, he wanted abruptly to be home, so he turned the corner of Willow Street and went in. The cool darkness fell about him.

Up the stairs, sidestepping the De Lucas's damp laundry heaped in waiting to be laid out to dry; nodding at the elderly Masonic verger who had taken care of his ma when Steve was at work and who, in a couple of years, would die; past the smells of _gulasz_ and dumplings by the door of the Polish family who'd just moved in—their father would be sent to the European front in early '41; Steve had never found out what had happened to him—to the third floor. He picked up the spare key from its hiding-place under a brick, fitted it in its key-hole. Pushed in.

Bucky was at the kitchen table sewing a hem.

Steve hovered in the doorway, almost uncertain about it, though he wasn't sure why: this _was_ Bucky in his undershirt, his profile in shadow. He was grimy with engine grease, he hadn't washed it off yet, and his hair stuck to the back of his neck with the dry heat. His hands moved quickly, threading the fabric of his trouser hem with practiced ease. Nothing about him was at all strange or peculiar. He was twenty years old.

"Close the gorram door," said Bucky gruffly, but then he glanced up at him and rolled his aching shoulders, acting demonstrative about it, grinning, and he added, "Took you a while."

"Yeah," said Steve. "Long way."

"I'll say." Bucky assessed him with a critical eye. "Nice hat." "It's yours," said Steve, and Bucky gave a quick look at it and said, "Huh."

The radio was on. _Pennies from Heaven_ , soft and crooning. The windows were open: it was dusk, Bucky had just come home from the garage. Any old evening. It was 1936. Steve was in love with his best friend and he hadn't ever told him, but he thought that maybe he knew.

"You wanna go out?" asked Bucky, "later? I was thinking, maybe, the Blue River," but then he stood restlessly and walked to the window, and stayed there with his hands in the pockets of his woolen trousers, gripping them into fists. His shoulders were well-made and golden in the darkening light. Steve took off his jacket slowly; his shirt was damp with sweat against his back.

"Yeah," he said. "Sure."

Bucky was biting his lip. "I don't know," he said, then stopped, visibly lost. He glanced back at Steve timidly. "It's—I want to dance, I _want_ —but I don't think I know how." He frowned, glanced outside, then back inward again. "How did I forget that?"

"It's easy. I'll show you, look," said Steve, New York's worst dancer, and took his hands and drew him away from the extraordinary spectacle out the window—all of Brooklyn crammed in very little space, and Manhattan in the distance like a fantasy land. He essayed a step, then another, and Bucky knew immediately what to do; how could he ever forget? How'd they burn it out of him? But even that was a passing, rapid thought.

"No, no," Bucky said, "like—" and took _another_ step from _another_ dance that wouldn't exist yet for a good forty years, and they bumped hard enough into the kitchen table that Steve staggered and muffled an oath.

"Easy," said Bucky, and stroked his hand down his flank, leaving it there, innocent as anything.

"Buck," said Steve. "Yeah. Hmm?"

"You should," said Steve, "clean up, I guess; if you wanna go dancing," and weakly touched the backs of his knuckles against Bucky's chest. Bucky's thumb was brushing against his abdomen, lazily, absently. Steve hooked two fingers in the fabric of his undershirt. Ah, yes: this was a dance, too. But then it changed in a second, and Bucky was staring down at him, his eyes immense and dark; and there was someone else, that exact moment, behind Bucky's eyes looking down at Steve.

"Jesus," he said, low in the throat, "I missed you, I miss you— _they burned you out of me_ —"

"Nah—didn't; couldn't," said Steve, hurt, "they never could," and drew him in, so that he had his arm around Bucky's shoulder and Bucky's face against the crook of his neck when Bucky shuddered hard, trembling, remembering. Steve felt the unhappiness of him in his teeth. But his body was hot and wanting—his hands roamed over Steve's chest, testing the fragility of his bones, his thin breaths, his skinny ribcage. Bucky tore himself away raggedly, and came back at once: cupped Steve's head in both his hands and dragged his mouth to his. He kissed him, long, angry, terrible kisses, not caring one whit that he could hurt him, pressing him hard against the kitchen table.

It was all wrong, the angle: they'd never done anything like this back home, when Steve had been small and bird-boned and—though his lungs didn't ache quite so much as they had then, because this place was Bucky's through and through—his breath came fast and choppy. It gave him vertigo. Like jumping into the ocean. But already Bucky pulled away and pushed his mouth roughly against his jaw, his cheek, his cheekbone, his brow, his ear, breathing hard himself: huge rasping gasping gulps of air. His hand clenched in Steve's shirt. He'd always been handsy, always touched more than he ought to, even before London, before he'd had cause …

"I want," he said, sounding awful with it, his brow creasing with unhappiness, "I want— _god_ —"

"I know," said Steve, but Bucky shook his head.

"You don't; you don't. I promise."

 

* * *

 

They had to compromise for these new bodies the same way they'd had to compromise for the old ones: haltingly, dearly, half-remembering to be gentle. Bucky was sweet with him, and almost hesitant. There was still a dark look in his eyes, but he held back—kept the darkness at bay—kept slowing them down, until Steve got fed up and knocked his hands away and stripped him straight out of his shirt, dragged it down his arms and off of him entirely. Then his breath went real slow. His eyes got real dark.

His body still—already—liked some of the same things: he shook when Steve ran his knuckles along the inside of his thighs, and bit back a half-hearted curse when he nuzzled into the crook of his throat. He lay Steve out on his back and promptly sat on top of him, pushing his hands back into the mattress, laughing when Steve bucked up against him, riding it out.

"Like this?"

"Yeah. Yeah … "

They had nothing about them, because Bucky's version of the afterworld did not, apparently, include rubbers or lubrication; so they made do with their hands and—briefly—their mouths, though they could not keep from kissing very long. Steve was halfway certain he could live on Bucky's kisses alone besides. Afterwards he sank his fingers in Bucky's hair and held his head in place, dragging his tongue alongside Bucky's, tasting him. Bucky was amenable to this; hell, he was smiling. When he pulled away at last he sat back on Steve's thighs, stared down at him, and said, "Did you want this— _this_ —" he paused to tweak one of Steve's nipples, "—back then?"

"Did you?" said Steve, uneasy.

"Yeah." Bucky frowned, and a shadow fell over his face. "I never asked, did I?"

"Neither did I," said Steve, pulling him down: kissed his mouth again, his cheek, his ear. Bucky slipped both arms around him, right off the mattress, so that they knelt together. He put his face in his hair.

"I couldn't dare," he said slowly. "Not when you were—I didn't think I could own you the way they did. I mean that," Bucky said, and sat back upon his heels and raked a hand through his hair. "They thought that they made you. Captain America: the country's golden son. I didn't want to make it so you couldn't look elsewhere."

"I didn't want to," Steve protested, but Bucky spoke right over him:

"—it didn't matter, it didn't, and I got you at night," he finished, raggedly, with a strange desultory half-smile, so that Steve glared at him and pulled away. "It mattered," Bucky said in a soft voice; "it mattered to me, that we could be that way." At night, only at night.

"Yeah, well." Steve shrugged, an unhappy little shrug of his bony shoulders. "We never said, did we?"

"I didn't want you to know," said Bucky, and Steve, appalled, exclaimed:

"Bucky, I _always_ knew."

"Yeah. Yeah." Bucky looked young and miserable, kneeling on the bare mattress. "I get that, now." He glanced up at Steve from under his lashes. "I wanted you to have a chance."

"Come here," said Steve, and Bucky—hesitant as a lost dog—came; let him kiss him and nudge him backwards and straddle him. His hands (both his hands; his body was young and alive, as yet untouched by the scars and the torture that would come) splayed over his shoulderblades when Steve pushed his mouth against his mouth, then stroked into his hair, and the next moment Bucky was holding his head in place and thrusting up against him, panting a little between kisses as they found friction, heat, motion. The head of his cock slipped between Steve's thighs, and when he muffled a curse Steve slipped a leg between his. "I missed you, too," Steve said, and then, without thinking: "I love you; I loved you then," as Bucky's left hand slid down to his ass, his thigh, rocking up hard against him, "I don't remember a time when I didn't love you," and that was his undoing, after all that. Bucky came sweet and long and breathing hard, just as he always had.

"Hey," he said—much, much later, "hey. When'd you die?" Frowning. "I thought … "

Steve was sitting up, cross-legged, watching him. They'd materialized clothes out of thin air: t-shirts stamped with modern slogans, well-worn jeans. Outside the window Brooklyn was red in the setting sun. He was himself again; he was Captain America again—maybe he'd never stopped—maybe it was all a matter of seeing himself a different way. Or Bucky's perspective was changing. He didn't care. All of Brooklyn and Bucky young and whole beside him; what else could he want for?

"I asked," he said, and drew his hand around the back of Bucky's neck and kissed him—and Bucky let him, smiling under his mouth; "I asked Thor."

" _Thor_." Bucky was briefly amused. "A regular god-worshipper, aren't you. Wish I'd met him before."

Steve said nothing.

"Steve—"

"No, yeah. He'd have liked you, I bet," said Steve, but now Bucky was looking at him funny. Bucky had always known how to read him: like an open book, he claimed, like a goddamn open—

But Bucky had gone pale. "Oh, pal."

"I brought the war to you," Steve said, but the sadness had reached Bucky's eyes.

"Fuck _me_. How long?"

"I don't know," said Steve, "I—I've been—walking."

"You're still alive," said Bucky, with awful finality.

"No. No. I died." He was fairly certain of that. He struggled, to remember. "Several times."

"You gotta go back," said Bucky.

"Not without you," said Steve. 

 

* * *

 

They stepped out, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not; Bucky's shoulder brushed his comfortably as they walked. Bucky looked over his kingdom—the looping streets, the sea, the rising heat, Hartman's Drug Store and Soda at the corner of Poplar and Henry—everything he had loved once, and somewhere still loved. Brooklyn lived in the corners of their bodies like a great lazy cat.

"I could do it," he said, quietly, when they had walked the same streets over and over for half an hour. "I could use the quiet." Then he caught Steve's look and added, "no; but listen: if this is _my_ afterlife—then I can make it anything. Make it rain, make it shine, make it London." He stuck his hands in his pockets, frowning at the heat-cracked sidewalks. "I could use a good death."

"Half of humanity," said Steve, and Bucky sighed and squared his shoulders and said,

"I know. Fuck. I _know_."

Steve stopped him, one hand on his arm. Bucky turned, glanced up at him and then away, and then visibly thought _fuck it, I'm dead_ and leaned in to kiss him, a kiss that was so long and so good it went down to Steve's bones, pressing up against him in full view of all of Brooklyn. "You gotta roll it back," he said, touching his forehead to Steve's, and cupping the back of his neck in his warm hands. "All of it. You gotta make a deal. Make time."

"Sell my soul at the crossroads," said Steve, wryly, but Bucky frowned, and shook his head.

"Don't joke about that. You don't know," he said. Then he glanced over Steve's shoulder and said sadly: "I didn't want you to see me like that again, Steve."

"Like—what," said Steve, and then the Winter Soldier shot him from the back, straight through. _Soviet slug, no rifling._

 

* * *

 

Steve bled to death in Brooklyn. In the last moments of his life, he watched the Winter Soldier approach him: black-masked, horrible, a vision out of a child's nightmares. Bucky had gone. Maybe, he thought desperately, he'd escaped. He choked on his own blood, remembering—Bucky in the sun, in Coney Island, in the surf, shaking water out of his eyes like a great shaggy dog—Bucky dancing in Prospect Hall, sweaty and happy and young—Bucky at ten, at fifteen, at twenty, a lifetime of him, years upon years of him; Steve had learned love loving him. The Winter Soldier loomed over him, implacable, blank-eyed.

"It's okay," Steve tried to say—tried to say: "I know you; I _know_ you," and it was like the first time, like going to sleep in the water. He'd cheated it long enough. His death had caught up with him, in the end, and his death had his friend's eyes.

 

 

### Sixth Gate.

"Steven Grant Rogers. How troublesome. I thought the storytellers were exaggerating your case of stubbornness; yet it appears not."

A woman, tall, dark of hair, disdainful and profoundly unhappy. Great antlers. A mask. No: her face, made angles and shadows; she was vaguely familiar: a family resemblance—? thought Steve; he was kneeling before her. He was in a dark hall, endless above and endless around. Sound was devoured by the distance. Lazily she crossed one black-clad leg over the other and said, "Well. We have a conundrum, do we not?"

With an effort, he pushed himself to his feet. The exertion felt like courting death. It was death.

"Strength, still! What resilience humans harbor. There are few who can stand their ground in my hall. Eat," she said, and before him there was a platter of fruit, and slices of cured meat, and dense black bread. A dark ale in a pitcher.

"Eat," she said, "you are tired."

"No," Steve made himself say. He didn't know precisely why: only that he mustn't eat—whatever foodstuffs were put in front of him, he must refuse. Who had told him that much? He could only recall shapes; names; people he had once loved. "I—no."

"No?" Her voice grew sour. The platter and the pitcher disappeared. The food would have turned to ash in his mouth.

He lifted his eyes to her. They were the deep, dark green of forest lakes. She looked amused. A family resemblance …

"Loki," he heard. It was his own voice, he realized, and with the realization came a consciousness of his body. He grasped at dawning awareness.

Her face had cramped briefly into an expression of anger. "Ahh. No. In another life, he and I might have overthrown Odin. But you have seen him, I take it: my brother. Is he yet playing games?"

Words landed silently in his head, like flightless birds: _she and I did not part lately on happy terms_. And much earlier—many, many nights ago, perhaps one fleeting night ago, words from the mouth of a god who had been his friend—telling miserably of the destruction of Asgard. _Our sister_ , Thor had said, and turned as though expecting his brother to speak in his turn, and found no one there. _The Allfather hid her existence from us. Asgard was destroyed. Hela._

He shook his head, trying to clear it. "Thor. Thor sent me."

"My other brother. Oh, yes. Did he tell you I was dead? They have ruined Asgard who should have let it thrive; it _should_ have thrived in the hands of its heir. But gods are not so very easily killed. Placated, perhaps. For a time." Her mouth twisted in a cruel moue. " _Banished_. To the realm of the half-dead, there to reign over a kingdom that defies understanding. They dare call it compassion.

"But you are here, little half-human. And something has gone wrong: I can taste it in the air of my halls. There is a lack of balance in this world. What was it?"

"Thanos," said Steve. He wavered on his feet. He still had on the jeans and t-shirt Bucky had given him. In his stomach Natasha's quarters glowed like stars. "An alien. Titan. Mad. He destroyed—half of us. Half of all of us."

She was briefly silenced by this. But then, glancing away: "Whatever mortals do to one another is none of my concern. You have come a long way for nothing."

"They weren't rightful deaths," said Steve, finding Thor's words easier in his mouth than his own. "None of them. Not yet. He had it wrong. He did it wrong."

"A trillion souls, vanished from existence in one dimension, and exiled to another! Do mortals not learn? Do you not know better than to challenge forces greater than you are? There is no easy path to restoring balance to the worlds. There are no shortcuts; nor easy deaths."

"Ma'am," said Steve, "I'd be only too happy to take 'em off your hands."

"So simple! No." She leaned back. Rapacious, her hands closed like talons around the arm-rests of her throne. "I, Hela— _I_ demand payment. For restoring the world."

Steve said, "You don't get payment. You get me."

"Is that enough?" Head cocked, she considered him. "Well, perhaps. It may be. Is that your play, Captain Rogers? Self-immolation?"

Steve thought about Brooklyn all rolled up together, Brooklyn like a great cat curled up on itself in the sun: it would be no great task, to return there. Radio on. Windows open in the hot evening. _Pennies From Heaven_. Forever. Absently he said, "I've done it before."

"And they sing your praises who remember you at all." Her lip curled. "No. It would be a _kindness_. Sacrifice is no sacrifice that is freely given away." She hummed a listless song: she was turning it over. With a flick of her pale hand, a pair of scales—poised in perfect balance—was placed to the side of him. It had, perhaps, always existed there in some fashion. She was playing at mythology. She was playing.

In this moment it held a single bone upon one scale. A small bone, perhaps a fingerbone, from the littlest finger of a child …

Steve stared at it. DNA he thought: the marrow of dead bones. What should happen, if he was to escape Hela's darkened halls with it? Would the world restore itself anew? Would every human being, every existent body who had vanished into black dirt—would they return to the mean, dust made into atoms made into cells made into bodies?

"Half of your world," said Hela. "One single bone." She stood; she was tall, tall; taller than any man on Earth. "Take it, and return safely home. What shall I take? Your heart, your soul, your spine. Your entrails to read my fortune in. So, then: what?"

 _Sell my soul at the crossroads._ "I don't know," Steve said, with halting honestly.

"If I ask for your soul, will you give it?"

"Yes."

"Your spine?"

"Yes."

"How bizarre humans are," she said. "What of your friend?"

Steve looked up at her. He knew the look on his face spoke of heartbreak: he knew, too, what she was about to ask.

"Your—friend," she said, in a delicate manner. "Do not play the prude; I have seen you; it was I who guided you to him. Is that not why you made your way into my halls, Captain: to say a final goodbye? Did you think it a coincidence, that you could find him so easily? Hardly so."

"Bucky," said Steve, "isn't mine to give."

"Oh, I think he is. He once argued quite fervently in your favor."

And Bucky's voice was in his head, in his own mouth, intensely familiar: _let him live, let him not die, take me, take anything, let him go back—_

"Go back," she said, derisively. "No. None return from this hall, Steve Rogers, who do not abandon something of themselves. You will never again be a whole and breathing man; nor even, perhaps, will you inhabit the form you held before you came. Nor for him who sought me out, looking for you. You will always leave part of yourself here, whatsoever you choose. Death leaves traces.

"But if I were to ask for your— _friendship_ —ah?" He'd twitched, in spite of himself; and now her smile was sly, her eyes low-hooded and bright. "Yes. Yes. That would be a true choice. Every moment, every tenderness, every fight and every death. Half of your precious humanity," said Hela, "against your life with him."

 _No,_ thought Steve, in stark horror, _never, never_ ; he couldn't fathom it. Years of loving Bucky gone in an instant, at a goddess' will, as though she could feed on their joys and their pains, and somehow make herself alive anew. It was worse than it had been to watch him dissolve into black dirt. To have been always without him: to never have known him, to never have loved him.

But he knew—marrow-deep—that he would give even that, if it would only be enough. A restlessness trembled at the edges of his brain.

 _Beware_ , Sam had said, falcon-Sam whose wings had shielded him.

 _Do not trust gods_ , Loki had said: _we always cheat._

 _You're still alive,_ Bucky had said, with his hands warm on Steve, with his mouth warm on Steve's. Warm and alive, his heartrate going up. Alive, alive: he must still have a living body; so Shuri had said, looking at white star-points dimly flickering. And Hela after all did not have dominion over him; all that she had was—custody. She held them in keeping. She held them safely, so that Thanos could not reach them, and further tilt the imbalances of the worlds. She was not cruel who wanted to enact payment: only she wanted payment, such as could restore her to the powers she had lost. _We always cheat._

One fingerbone, and contained within it was half of the world, and Bucky.

"No way in hell," Steve said. Refusal tasted bitter on his lips. Hela gazed at him. Her voice, when she spoke, was a low growl. "No?"

"I don't think you can," said Steve. "I would be dead a thousand times over, if it hadn't been for Bucky. Take him away, you change time. You change this. It won't work: it's a cheat." He shrugged. "Gotta find some other way."

"Gotta," Hela sang, mockingly, "gotta, gotta. _Paradoxes_. Pah!"

The little fingerbone spun on its axis, untouched and unwanted. They might have remained in the great halls of the dead for centuries on end; and perhaps they did.

Something in Steve's pocket began to chatter, a light, trembling sound. Hela's head twitched. He pulled it out: it was the scarab Shuri had pressed into his hands, before he'd gone under. But now he saw the machinery of it; gears interlocking; antennae clicking; the delicate mechanism of seconds passing. The head was made of glass, smooth and cold under the stroke of his thumb. It was a watch. It was a watch, finely-made and counting down. A few seconds were left to him.

Hela was staring at it, keen, hard, her eyes alight with a terrible hunger.

Steve thought: _we're out of time. Both of us, together._ He felt awareness tug at his bones, drawing him out. He almost had it—the thought that slithered like a serpent at the edges of his mind—Jörmungandr—the serpent around the world, biting its own tail. He was close to understanding. Blindly, he chased after it. You gotta make a deal. You gotta make time.

The brightest mind in the world had sent him into the underworld, and she had given him time.

Hela's nails— _claws_ —dug scars in the wooden throne. "Time," she croaked, as though she had read into his thoughts. Her face had become bird-like and sharp.

"Ten seconds," Steve murmured.

What did one give to the ferryman? Payment, for safe passage. To a banished goddess stranded in the realm of the half-dead, unbreathing, captured in the space of the single moment before her death—

The scarab's glass face reflected the half-light. Eight seconds.

Seven.

Steve took a slow breath. Then he sought the familiar motion that was deep in his bones: the hard-earned memory of throwing a long, lazy baseball; the hard tug of muscle as he half-turned and pulled his arm away and back; finding the perfect angle, and then—at the right moment—knowing how to let go …

With a cry like a laceration Hela soared forward, changing, _evolving_ , her arms making into wings, her hands into talons, her head into a raven's head. At the sixth second she tore past him; at the fifth he was turning away; at the fourth second his fingers closed around the fingerbone—

 

* * *

 

The smell of poppies rose up to meet him, full and dark. 

 

 

### Seventh Gate.

"His signals are steady. Seems to be getting along quite well. Samples?"

"Liver and thyroid are stable."

"Motor reflexes are responding correctly."

"No brain trauma to see—or any swellings at all—on the MRI."

"We're administrating glucose intravenously."

"We _could_ trigger chemical engineering with hyperbaric oxygen—"

"No." Thoughtfully. He knew her voice. "I'll take a look at his blood work. For now, keep him under opiates. Let him sleep."

 

* * *

 

"Well whoop-dee-fucking-doo, Rogers, I come here as sweet as a choirboy willing to make amends, and you're _fast asleep._ That's. Typical."

Howard. Or—no—?

"Got to hand it to you, though, you make self-sacrifice look a hell of a lot cooler than I ever did. Did I say I've gone to space? Again? Big place. Lots of stars." A pause. "But you got the kid back. He's alright. He's fine. I guess we're even there, Cap."

 

* * *

 

"Happy birthday. We just prevented your deportation to the US. Lots of people in suits are very unhappy with you." A long, jaw-cracking yawn. "Gotta say, pal, I don't know why you keep giving out second chances to these assholes."

 

* * *

 

"He's responding to stimuli."

 

* * *

 

"Stand back. Let him breathe."

 

* * *

 

When he opened his eyes, a baseball match was playing on the radio.

 

* * *

 

"How long was I out?" His own voice—throaty, croaky, rusty as hell. His own body. It hurt to breathe.

"Four years." Shuri, crowned in the light, smiled at him. "Welcome back."

"Where am I?" 

"Wakanda. You are quite safe."

"Four years," Steve murmured. He closed his eyes again.

"We thought it better to let you sleep," she said, not unkindly. "Your body was battered and slashed to ribbons. We nearly lost you several times. Although," she added, "your Sergeant Barnes would have gone down there himself and dragged you back, if you had died."

 

* * *

 

When he was off meds long enough to feel it, he saw that the littlest finger on his left hand was missing—loped off neatly at the first knuckle.

 

* * *

 

The sun of Wakanda was warm and red. Steve awoke from what he was fairly certain had been chemically induced slumber on a pallet furnished with woven blankets and a heavy, well-made mattress. He watched for a long moment the bright square of the doorway in the darkened house. He was in no danger. He was entirely safe.

When he heaved himself up on one elbow and then slung his heavy legs over the edge of the bed, he saw that the doorway opened almost directly into the valley at the heart of Wakanda: he could see trees, tall grasslands, the bend of a river in the distance. There came soft sounds, animal sounds, from behind the far wall. Apart from that, silence: absolute blessed silence.

He tested his strength. He found that he could sit. After perhaps twenty minutes, he made himself stand.

The room was sparsely furnished—a table, a commode, the pallet upon which he had slept, large enough for two men to sleep, comfortable; shelves and shelves upon which books and sleek black objects he could neither understand nor recognize had been piled carelessly. Wakandan tech. The books were a bit of everything, though: The Hobbit, John Le Carré, _Spider-Man Versus The Mask Of Death,_ Harper Lee. The walls were redwood, and threaded through with thrumming vibranium. Another doorway opened into another room, which was quite dark: when he glanced into it, he saw that it contained a desk, a chair, a slim laptop, several heavy-duty ledgers and—left aside beside an empty plate and a half-full glass of sour milk—what he presumed was Bucky's phone, slim and glossy black.

He didn't dare touch it. Four years into the future, there was no guarantee it wouldn't spontaneously explode as a self-survival measure.

He stepped outside. It was the lowest point of the afternoon; the sun was descending over the mountains. Bucky's farm lay at the bottom of the valley, in a grove of fruit-bearing trees and sweet-smelling, late-autumn red poppies. Sacks of honey-barley were heaped against the outer wall, one of which had cracked open and spilled its warm-smelling burden; to the east the orchard opened towards the stream, which ran between tall, strange trees. As he walked slowly down the path to the water, a sheep wandered into his way—it had an oddly-made head, and it _baa_ ed reproachfully at him; then he saw it was a mechanical head, grafted neatly on. Mildly perturbed, he pushed the sheep gently out of his way and let it graze.

Bucky was sitting against a fallen branch, in the bend of the creek. His hair was cut shorter than Steve remembered; he wore scuffed jeans and a dark, torn shirt. His left arm was made to look like flesh. Improbably, he was spinning yarn. He glanced up when Steve came closer, and a bright look came into his eyes, a smile as dazzling as any he'd ever given to the dozens of Mildreds and Marthas he'd danced with before the war.

"'bout time you woke up," he said. But his eyes were warm. "You've been asleep."

Steve looked at him, unspeaking.

Bucky said, "Siddown."

He was alive. The warmth and the solidity of him, when he had been black dirt crumbling in Steve's hands. Steve sat, heavily. He rested his cheek against Bucky's shoulder and felt the tears burn at his eyes.

"Hey, hey—none of that." Bucky's thumb gently brushed a tear away. "You're alright."

"You were dead," said Steve. "Buck. You can't know."

"Sure I can." Which he could: Bucky had once thought him dead also. "Besides, then—you brought me back, you stupid lump. Brought the whole world back. I dunno what you did down there," Bucky said caressingly, his hand catching at Steve's half-missing smallest finger, "what you _gave_ ; apparently it was enough." He sounded mildly exasperated. "You keep on offering yourself to death, one of those days it's goin' to take you for granted."

"Time," said Steve, apropos of nothing.

"What?"

"I had to give her time."

Bucky looked down at him, bewildered. "Damn those meds are something else. What the hell are you talking about?"

"It doesn't matter," said Steve, and cupped his face in both his hands and kissed him, very slowly, until Bucky with a soft surprised sound laid down his spindle and grabbed him hard against him. They grappled and ended up hugging so damn tightly Bucky let out a laughing moan and kissed him, tremblingly, their mouths open catching at each other's. He sank his hand—it even felt real—into Steve's hair and caught him against the side of the branch, kissing him good and hard, as Bucky knew how.

Afterwards he pushed him backwards into the grass; Steve clutched Bucky's hand against his chest. "I love this place," said Bucky, eyes drifting shut. The sky was blown wide open above them, breathless electric blue.

"I slept," said Steve.

Bucky tilted his head, looked at him. "Yeah," he said, finally. "You did."

"Any _other_ alien invade while I was out?"

A huff of laughter. "A couple. Stark and Sam and Romanov took care of most of them. And—well, you'll meet Danvers."

"Four years," he marveled. "What else did I miss? Who's president?"

"We thought," said Bucky, and then stopped and started again, haltingly. "We thought you weren't gonna wake up. For a long while. You were working on all signals. All systems go, brain functions, reflexes, and you wouldn't wake. Like you were deep, deep down. Somewhere."

He had been. Steve said, "They're all back?"

"Yeah, Steve," Bucky said gently. "You brought them back. Brought me back."

"She'll come back too," Steve said. He had the certainty of this burrowed into the marrow of his bones: he'd given a half-undead goddess four seconds of life—four years, perhaps; worse yet, he's given Thor's sister one of his bones. She'd abandoned custody of the dead for him. There was a debt owed. He had no doubt she would come calling.

"Whoever she is," said Bucky, "we'll deal with it: I swear: _later_." He pressed a fierce kiss to Steve's hair, and his arm tightened around Steve's shoulders. "For what good it's worth, things in this world are—they're good. T'Challa is king. Wakanda thrives. Wilson, though, Sam fuckin' _Wilson_ is Captain America. Picked up the shield two years ago; it seemed to make the most sense; he's doing good work in New York, so I hear. Stark is—" He paused. "Stark is Stark." And there the discussion ended, looked like.

"Sam'll do good," Steve said absently. His hands ached for his shield, but he could think of no better man for the job.

"Natasha?"

"With Wanda, last I heard. Somewhere in Vienna. Witches!" Bucky shook his head fondly. "Swear to god: what a place to be."

Steve nodded. His thoughts were drifting; he felt lazy and well, as though he had no place to be. Come to it, he didn't. Brooklyn was on the far shore; yet he was in no great hurry. "Bucky," he said, and then promptly forgot what he was about to say in favor of: "Your sheep are androids."

He felt Bucky smile against his temple. "Electric."

"What was it like," he asked—"coming back. Did it—"

A shrug. "Didn't hurt. Don't remember it well. I wasn't there just for a bit, then I … " Bucky trailed off, biting his lip. "I guess I _was_. You messed around with the whole continuum, to hear Banner tell it. You got us back four seconds in the past, and that was enough to change the world."

"Thanos—"

"Dead," said Bucky. "Thor." He didn't elaborate.

Steve said: "Are we happy?" He meant, _Do you miss Brooklyn?_ They had been happy, for exactly one half-hour in the underworld. He scarcely remembered it: only as a certainty that he had been in the right place in the right time; he had been where he'd always been supposed to. Brooklyn. And Bucky smiled at him, sadly, and shrugged; Bucky who'd always known exactly what he meant; Bucky whose shadow had walked beside him, and held him, and kissed his mouth, deep in the bowels of the earth.

"You went to Hell and back," he said, which wasn't an answer but also kinda was half of an answer. "You got a lesson to learn about self-sacrifice, Rogers. As in: you wanna stop doing it. One of these days I'm gonna be the one saving your ass, and then there'll be trouble for us all … "

"You always have," said Steve, and Bucky frowned but didn't answer.

"Wait. I got something." He got to his feet, a smooth easy motion that left Steve admiring the curve of his ass, and walked away apace—just long enough for Steve to start missing him again. He had missed Bucky for so long he barely knew what to do when he had him. But Bucky returned, triumphant, with fruit he had picked from the low-hanging branches. They sat together in the grass.

"It's good," said Bucky, handing him one of the fine small scarlet fruit. Its skin was smooth as a pomegranate. "Like nothing I've ever tasted, but damn good. They make juice out of 'em too. Cocktails." Easily he split his own in two: it pulled apart into quarters, its flesh was the colour of a sour cherry. When he bit into it, his mouth got stained red with the juice.

It tasted tart, with a hidden delicacy. He couldn't place it. Like a little sun. He swallowed half of the fruit in two mouthfuls, so that Bucky had to lay his hand gently on his wrist, slowing him. "Calm down. There's plenty more. I've milk at the farm … " But Steve ate it all. Laughing, Bucky handed him another, and then wrapped his hand around the back of Steve's neck and brought him close enough to kiss him.

"Hi," he murmured, against Steve's mouth. His eyelashes brushed Steve's cheek as he spoke.

"Hey, yourself," Steve said, throat tight. He blinked and tilted his head, finding Bucky's mouth open and sweet for him. Bucky slipped him a little tongue, a little teeth, all tease. He tasted like the earth's hidden fruit.

They slept awhile in the sun, all tangled together like puppies; Bucky slept deep and dark, he looked exhausted, and awakening clutched at him vaguely, muttering his name. "'s alright, Buck," Steve said, curling his hand around his waist to the curve of his ass. Bucky blinked sleepily at him, said something so soft Steve didn't catch it, and went back to sleep. Surely tomorrow T'Challa would visit; surely Shuri would know he was awake, monitoring him. He would call Sam, and Natasha. He could call Tony, and endure the awkwardness of that conversation: though it was needed. There was time enough. Let him sleep. It took a toll on a body, coming back to life.

When they woke the sun was getting low, and they walked lazily up the path to the farm, to eat Bucky's bread and drink his goats' sweet-sour milk. The night was falling fast. But there was a light inside, and they came in together out of the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Infinity War comes in, lays waste to all my RL productivity, and ends a two-year fic drought. I wrote the first draft of this in a furious daze, coming home from the cinema. Some OTPs don't leave you, man.
> 
> I worked so many underworld/journey to hades/katabasis tropes into this that I've lost count; you could make a drinking game out of it. It was fun, though: making one gigantic mythology out of it all.
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](sombre-gods.tumblr.com)! I've recently caved and changed my account, and my dash is sadly bare of content atm.


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